12.1 A 3D-Integrated Microring-Based 112Gb/s PAM-4 Silicon-Photonic Transmitter with Integrated Nonlinear Equalization and Thermal Control
Hao Li, Ganesh Balamurugan, Meer Sakib, Ranjeet Kumar, Hasitha Jayatilleka, Haisheng Rong, James Jaussi, Bryan Casper
Abstract
The explosive growth of data and data-centric computing places stringent demands on the bandwidth and energy efficiency of data center interconnects, spurring the development of several 400G Ethernet standards [1]. Silicon-photonics-based solutions are of particular interest for low cost 100+Gb/s/λ optical transceivers. Microring modulators (MRMs) can significantly scale the size and power of optical TX (OTX) compared to Mach-Zehnder modulators being used today [2]-[9]. However MRMs suffer from three significant drawbacks that have limited their use in 100+Gb/s optical transceivers: (a) tradeoff between bandwidth and phase efficiency inherent to these resonant modulators, (b) high process and temperature (P/T) sensitivity, and (c) non-linear electro-optic (E-to-O) characteristics. This paper presents a 3D-integrated 112Gb/s PAM-4 OTX with electronic nonlinear pre-distortion (NL-PD) and nonlinear FFE (NL-FFE) to compensate MRM nonlinearity and integrated thermal control (TC) to mitigate P/T sensitivity.