Monolithically integrated 112 Gbps PAM4 optical transmitter and receiver in a 45 nm CMOS-silicon photonics process
Thomas Baehr-Jones, Shahab Ardalan, Matthew P. Chang, Saman Jafarlou, Xavier Serey, G. Zarris, Gabriel Thompson, Artsroun Darbinian, Brian R. West, Babak Behnia, Vesselin Velev, Yun Zhe Li, Katherine E. 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, Matthew Streshinsky
Abstract
We demonstrate a transmitter and receiver in a silicon photonics platform for O-band optical communication that monolithically incorporates a modulator driver, traveling-wave Mach-Zehnder modulator, control circuitry, photodetector, and transimpedance amplifier (TIA) in the GlobalFoundries Fotonix (45SPCLO) platform. The transmitter and receiver show an open 112 Gbps PAM4 eye at a 4.3 pJ/bit energy efficiency, not including the laser. Extensive use of gain-peaking enables our modulator driver and TIA to achieve the high bandwidths needed in the 45 nm CMOS-silicon photonics process. Our results suggest an alternative to the frequent approach of bump-bonding BiCMOS drivers and TIAs to silicon photonics.