Applications of diffractive and refractive micro-optical elements in optical interconnect system demonstrators

The advances in the design and fabrication of microlaser arrays, photodetectors and free-space optical interconnection elements have driven the creation of ever more "real world" demonstrator systems. In this paper we review the progress made to date on two separate demonstrator projects which have been assembled at Heriot-Watt University. We shall describe some of the enabling technologies used in the creation of these systems and outline the potential for scaling the architectures described up to sizes where the computational advantages of the optics-in-computing paradigm become highly attractive.