A PAM4 Dielectric Waveguide Link in 28 nm CMOS
Kristof Dens, Joren Vaes, Simon Ooms, Martin Wagner, Patrick Reynaert
Abstract
This work presents a dielectric waveguide communication link at 135 GHz, reaching 27 Gb/s non-return to-zero (NRZ) communication without any equalization at a bit-error-rate (BER) below 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−12</sup> and up to 50 Gb/s 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4) over 3 m of fiber at a BER below 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−6</sup> when equalization is applied. This work is the first to break the 25 Gb/s barrier at distances of 1 m and above. These results are achieved by combining a low power, multilevel mm-wave transceiver with a coupler on printed circuit board (PCB) and a fiber design optimized for low dispersion.