Abstract

This article presents a 2-channel 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) transmitter front-end consisting of a 2-channel PAM4 shunt laser diode (LD) driver and flip-chip-bonded 1.3-μm LD array-on-Si that has the highest power efficiency yet reported for PAM4 transmitter front-ends. The driver was designed and fabricated using 65-nm CMOS technology, and the LD array-on-Si was fabricated using 1.3-μm membrane LD array-on-Si technology. To decrease the power consumption, the front-end does not use a high-speed digital-to-analog converter (DAC) or linear driver for generating the PAM4 signals. Instead, to generate clear PAM4 signals, the shunt LD driver incorporates DAC, and equalizing functions. The driver was designed with a photonic-electronic conversion system in SPICE, and the transmitter front-end was implemented with flip-chip-bonding interconnection between the driver and LD array-on-Si. The resulting 2-channel PAM4 transmitter front-end has high power efficiency. Our experiments show that in simultaneous operation, each channel could transmit 53-Gbps PAM4 signals, resulting in a power efficiency of 0.57 mW/Gbps. They also show that feed-forward equalization (FFE) with only 10 taps is enough for 2-km-long standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission of 53-Gbps PAM4 signals with a bit error rate (BER) below 2.3 × 10⁻⁴ when the two channels are operated simultaneously.

53 GBd PAM-4 fully-integrated silicon photonics transmitter with a hybrid flip-chip bonded laser

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Opt. Express 30(23) 41980-41998 (2022)

50 GBd PAM4 transmitter with a 55nm SiGe BiCMOS driver and silicon photonic segmented MZM

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Opt. Express 28(16) 23950-23960 (2020)

16-channel photonic–electric co-designed silicon transmitter with ultra-low power consumption

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Photon. Res. 11(2) 143-149 (2023)

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)

100-Gbps CMOS transceiver for multilane optical backplane system with a 1.3 cm² footprint

Takashi Takemoto, Fumio Yuki, Hiroki Yamashita, Shinji Tsuji, Yong Lee, Koichiro Adachi, Kazunori Shinoda, Yasunobu Matsuoka, Kenji Kogo, Shinji Nishimura, Masaaki Nido, Masahiko Namiwaka, Taro Kaneko, Takara Sugimoto, and Kazuhiko Kurata
Opt. Express 19(26) B777-B783 (2011)