Fiber-optic links based on silicon photonics for high-speed readout of trackers

Abstract

We propose to use silicon photonics technology to build radiation-hard fiber-optic links for high-bandwidth readout of tracking detectors. The CMOS integrated silicon photonics was developed by Luxtera and commercialized by Molex. The commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) fiber-optic links feature moderate radiation tolerance insufficient for trackers. A transceiver contains four RX and four TX channels operating at 10 Gbps each. The next generation will likely operate at 25 Gbps per channel. The approach uses a standard CMOS process and single-mode fibers, providing low power consumption and good scalability and reliability.

Readout Technologies for Future Detectors

“…So far the majority of fiber-optical data transmission in HEP experiments are relying on VCSELs and EELs [2,9]. The Si-photonics technology is relatively new to HEP; it has been explored since 2011 for use in the present and future experiments [7,10].…”

A radiation tolerant Data link board for the ATLAS Tile Cal upgrade

“…An issue with this solution is that the PIC processor in charge of initialization is not sufficiently radiation tolerant. There are several ways to solve this [9]. A Flash memory is included for fast reconfiguration of each FPGA.…”

Fast (optical) Links

“…So far the majority of fiber-optical data transmission in HEP experiments are relying on VCSELs and EELs [14,20]. The Si-photonics technology is relatively new to HEP; it has been explored since 2011 for use in the present and future experiments [21,22]. Modern commercial laserbased transceivers operate at 50 Gbps per optical link in 400G QSFP modules with power consumption of about 30 pJ/bit [23].…”