| Abstract
| - Abstract. Optical clock signal distribution has been widely discussed to be an attractive way to reduce the clock skew in high-speed digital systems. For short interconnect lengths, especially for chip level clock distribution, free space systems using diffractive optical elements (DOEs) have specific advantages. The optoelectronic pathway described in this paper consists of a GaAs laser diode, a microetched silicon mirror, a faceted diffractive element and four silicon photodiodes hybridized to a (dummy) silicon chip. The key element of the clock distribution demonstrator is the diffractive element which matches setup requirements like compactness, off-axis geometry and use of an unshaped laser beam. The whole setup meets the demands of alignment accuracy in an excellent way. This is achieved by the very good imaging characteristic of the DOE and by an alignment technique based on precision mounting of micromachined silicon components. The system was tested with clock rates up to 2.5 GHz, the cut-off frequency is 350 MHz.
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