Abstract

The use of four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) has emerged as a solution to increase the serial rate in short-range optical links, offering twice the data throughput but requiring similar bandwidth as on–off keying. However, the receiver design should take into account the increased susceptibility of PAM-4 to noise, intersymbol interference, and nonlinearity. This papers explores these challenges, and details the design of a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) for 64-Gb/s PAM-4 optical links. The TIA was implemented in 0.13-µm SiGe BiCMOS, and has a power consumption of 180 mW. It contains a digital gain controller, which allows switching between four gain modes, to tradeoff sensitivity against linearity. Bit error rate (BER) measurements show that the dynamic range is significantly extended: Optical modulation amplitudes between $-$ 7 dBm and at least $-$ 0.2 dBm yield a BER lower than $10^{-3}$ .

© 2017 IEEE

64 Gb/s PAM4 VCSEL-based FSO link

Hai-Han Lu, Chung-Yi Li, Chun-Ming Ho, Ming-Te Cheng, Xin-Yao Lin, Zih-Yi Yang, and Hwan-Wei Chen
Opt. Express 25(5) 5749-5757 (2017)

Co-design of a differential transimpedance amplifier and balanced photodetector for a sub-pJ/bit silicon photonics receiver

Ke Li, Shenghao Liu, Xiaoke Ruan, Dave J. Thomson, Yang Hong, Fan Yang, Lei Zhang, Cosimo Lacava, Fanfan Meng, Weiwei Zhang, Periklis Petropoulos, Fan Zhang, and Graham T. Reed
Opt. Express 28(9) 14038-14054 (2020)

Monolithically integrated 112 Gbps PAM4 optical transmitter and receiver in a 45 nm CMOS-silicon photonics process

Thomas Baehr-Jones, Shahab Ardalan, Matthew Chang, Saman Jafarlou, Xavier Serey, George Zarris, Gabriel Thompson, Artsroun Darbinian, Brian West, Babak Behnia, Vesselin Velev, Yun Zhe Li, Katherine Roelofs, Wuchun Wu, Jim Mali, Jiahao Zhan, Noam Ophir, Chris Horng, Romanas Narevich, Fen Guan, Jinghui Yang, Hao Wu, Patrick Maupin, Rhys Manley, Yogi Ahuja, Ari Novack, Lei Wang, and Matthew Streshinsky
Opt. Express 31(15) 24926-24938 (2023)

Monolithic 56 Gb/s silicon photonic pulse-amplitude modulation transmitter

Chi Xiong, Douglas M. Gill, Jonathan E. Proesel, Jason S. Orcutt, Wilfried Haensch, and William M. J. Green
Optica 3(10) 1060-1065 (2016)

64  Gb/s low-voltage waveguide SiGe avalanche photodiodes with distributed Bragg reflectors

Binhao Wang, Zhihong Huang, Yuan Yuan, Di Liang, Xiaoge Zeng, Marco Fiorentino, and Raymond G. Beausoleil
Photon. Res. 8(7) 1118-1123 (2020)