Performance of reconfigurable free-space card-to-card optical interconnects under atmospheric turbulence

Free-space based card-to-card optical interconnects are promising candidates for the provision of parallel high-speed and reconfigurable interconnectivity in data-centers and high-performance computing clusters. However, the atmospheric turbulence may degrade the interconnect performance due to the beam wander, signal scintillation, and beam broadening effects. In this paper, the experimental investigation of the impact of both moderate and comparatively strong atmospheric turbulence on the bit-error-rate (BER) performance of our proposed reconfigurable free-space card-to-card optical interconnects is presented. Experimental results show that the BER performance does suffer power penalties of ~0.5 dB and ~1.6 dB at BER of 10-9 under moderate and strong levels of turbulence respectively.