Low-Cost 400 Gbps DR4 Silicon Photonics Transmitter for Short-Reach Datacenter Application

Abstract

Targeting high-speed, low-cost, short-reach intra-datacenter connections, we designed and tested an integrated silicon photonic circuit as a transmitter engine. This engine can be packaged into an optical transceiver module which meets the QSFP-DD Form Factor, together with other electrical/optical components. We first present the design and performance of a high-speed silicon modulator, which had a 3-dB EO bandwidth of >40 GHz and an ER of >5 dB. We then incorporated the engine onto a test board and injected a 53.125 Gbaud PAM4 signal. Clear eye patterns were observed at the receiver with TDECQ ~3 dB for all four lanes.

Microring resonator-based all-optical parallel pseudo random binary sequence generator for rate multiplication

“…The operation of the designed MRR-based AO parallel PRBS generator for rate doubling and quadrupling has been simulated assuming rectangular non-return-to-zero (NRZ) data pulses. Technologically, these pulses can be generated in the optical domain at hundreds of Gb/s per data channel by exploiting the recent advancements of photonic materials together with those in digital signal processing (Zhu et al 2021). Table 7 lists the parameters values The data rates achieved here using the parallel PRBS generator are 500 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s for speed doubling and quadrupling, respectively.…”