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

Abstract

A hybrid integrated 16-channel silicon transmitter based on co-designed photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and electrical chiplets is demonstrated. The driver in the 65 nm CMOS process employs the combination of a distributed architecture, two-tap feedforward equalization (FFE), and a push–pull output stage, exhibiting an estimated differential output swing of 4.0Vpp. The rms jitter of 2.0 ps is achieved at 50 Gb/s under nonreturn-to-zero on–off keying (NRZ-OOK) modulation. The PICs are fabricated on a standard silicon-on-insulator platform and consist of 16 parallel silicon dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulators on a single chip. The chip-on-board co-packaged Si transmitter is constituted by the multichannel chiplets without any off-chip bias control, which significantly simplifies the system complexity. Experimentally, the open and clear optical eye diagrams of selected channels up to 50 Gb/s OOK with extinction ratios exceeding 3 dB are obtained without any digital signal processing. The power consumption of the Si transmitter with a high integration density featuring a throughput up to 800 Gb/s is only 5.35 pJ/bit, indicating a great potential for massively parallel terabit-scale optical interconnects for future hyperscale data centers and high-performance computing systems.