Design of a 50-Gb/s Hybrid Integrated Si-Photonic Optical Link in 16-nm FinFET
Mayank Raj, Yohan Frans, Ping-Chuan Chiang, Sai Lalith Chaitanya Ambatipudi, David Mahashin, Peter De Heyn, Sadhishkumar Balakrishnan, Joris Van Campenhout, Jimmy Grayson, M. Epitaux, Ken Chang
Abstract
This article presents an electro-absorption modulator (EAM)-based single-mode (SM) 50-Gb/s non return to zero (NRZ) Si-photonic optical link in a 16-nm FinFET. The EAM device is modeled to include its electrical and optical properties. The transmitter (TX) uses T-coil based over-peaking to improve modulation efficiency and relax transimpedance amplifier's (TIA's) bandwidth and noise requirement. The receiver (RX) uses a three-stage TIA with T-coils to improve bandwidth. The link sensitivity is -10.9-dBm optical modulation amplitude (OMA) at bit error rate (BER) <; 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-12</sup> with 2-dB link margin at 50 Gb/s. The combined power efficiency of the RX, TX, and clocking is 3.16 pJ/bit and the external laser consumes 1.15 pJ/bit with 10% wall-plug efficiency.