Silicon photonic receiver and transmitter operating up to 36 Gb/s for λ~1550 nm

Abstract

We present the hybrid-integrated silicon photonic receiver and transmitter based on silicon photonic devices and 65 nm bulk CMOS interface circuits operating over 30 Gb/s with a 10(-12) bit error rate (BER) for λ ~1550nm. The silicon photonic receiver, operating up to 36 Gb/s, is based on a vertical-illumination type Ge-on-Si photodetector (Ge PD) hybrid-integrated with a CMOS receiver front-end circuit (CMOS Rx IC), and exhibits high sensitivities of -11 dBm, -8 dBm, and -2 dBm for data rates of 25 Gb/s, 30 Gb/s and 36 Gb/s, respectively, at a BER of 10(-12). The measured energy efficiency of the Si-photonic receiver is 2.6 pJ/bit at 25 Gb/s with an optical input power of -11 dBm, and 2.1 pJ/bit at 36 Gb/s with an optical power of -2 dBm. The hybrid-integrated silicon photonic transmitter, comprised of a depletion-type Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) and a CMOS driver circuit (CMOS Tx IC), shows better than 5.7 dB extinction ratio (ER) for 25 Gb/s, and 3 dB ER for 36 Gb/s. The silicon photonic transmitter achieves the data transmission with less than 10(-15) BER at 25 Gb/s, 10(-14) BER at 28 Gb/s, and 6 x 10(-13) BER with the energy efficiency of ~6 pJ/bit at 30 Gb/s.

Sub-fF-Capacitance Photonic-Crystal Photodetector Towards fJ/bit On-Chip Receiver

“…We assume an optical responsivity η pd = 1 A/W, which is actually obtained in the experiment. Figure 1 (b) also includes plots for reported Ge-based photoreceivers integrated with a Si-CMOS TIA/Limiting amplifier (LA) circuit [4], [12], [13] and InGaAs-based photoreceivers integrated with an InP-based heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT)/high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) circuit [14]- [17]. These receivers support a high conversion efficiency and large bandwidth thanks to the integrated amplifiers.…”

Monolithic optoelectronic integrated broadband optical receiver with graphene photodetectors

“…Hence, a photocurrent signal amplifier circuit is required in the optical receiver to amplify detected signals. Recently, development of optical receivers with low cost and high performance is a research hotspot [1,2]. Fortunately, amplifier circuits can be achieved via integrated circuits (ICs) with the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology and cost will be significantly reduced with the mature microelectronic technology.…”

100 Gb/s photoreceiver module based on 4ch × 25 Gb/s vertical-illumination-type Ge-on-Si photodetectors and amplifier circuits

“…For the next-generation high-speed data communication and interconnect systems operating over 100 Gb/s, silicon photonics is regarded as a promising technology, providing cost-effective optical devices based on mature silicon CMOS fabrication technology [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. For the pursuit of high-speed and energy-efficient silicon photonic receivers, which are the core components of the silicon-based optical communication systems, intensive efforts have been made to progress efficient silicon photonic device sand CMOS interface circuit.…”

“…Recently, there has been remarkable progress in Ge-on-Si photodetectors (Ge PDs) [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], which are the main active components in silicon optical receivers, and also in CMOS ICs for optical/electrical (O/E) interface and all-silicon photonic/CMOS receivers [6][7][8][9][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. There have been reports on silicon photonic receivers where Ge waveguide (WG) PDs on SOI substrates and CMOS Rx ICs were monolithic-or hybrid-integrated [2,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36].…”

“…There have been reports on silicon photonic receivers where Ge waveguide (WG) PDs on SOI substrates and CMOS Rx ICs were monolithic-or hybrid-integrated [2,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. In general, most of reported Ge PDs are waveguide-type defined on SOI [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34], whereas most of CMOS ICs are based on bulk silicon technology. On the other hand, vertical-illumination Ge PDs are defined on bulk silicon [6,9,22,[24][25][26], and are of interest since they can enable the monolithic integration with bulk CMOS ICs more realistic, and have a big advantage in packaging with optical fiber.…”