Optical connectors are used to connect optical signals between two optical components, such as between two optical fibers, between an optical fiber and a piece of optical or optoelectronic equipment, or between two pieces of optical or optoelectronic equipment. Due to its many advantages, optical fibers and other optical transports, such as optical waveguides, are increasingly being used to transport signals within individual pieces of electronic equipment, such as computers, cellular telephones, televisions, etc. Accordingly, optical connections must be made across printed circuit boards that are movable relative to each other. For instance, a removable daughter card, such as a PCMCIA card might mate to a motherboard through the back panel of a personal computer. There are several different relative orientations in which two PCB boards (or cards) may mate, including coplanar, orthogonal, and conventional backplane, each having a different relative orientation between the two mating PCBs.
Furthermore, there are many different styles of optical connectors. Merely a few of the well-known standard optical connector styles are LC, MT, MPO, SC, and ST. Each connector style has its own form factor and can be mated only to another connector of the same style.
As data rates and bandwidths in electronic devices continue to increase, it sometimes is the case that a manufacturer of an electronic device wishes to upgrade the type of optical connector style used in a card without having to replace the entire card. For example, an LC connector can have up to four optical transports in it. If a daughter card, such as a PCMCIA card for a personal computer was originally designed to mate with a backplane using LC connectors, the manufacturer eventually may be interested in upgrading the optical couplings from LC style connectors to MT style connectors, which can support up to 72 fibers per connector, in order to increase the bandwidth of the data transfer between the motherboard and the daughter card.
Typically, this requires a complete redesign of both the mother board and the daughter card.