Ultralow Power 80 Gb/s Arrayed CMOS Silicon Photonic Transceivers for WDM Optical Links

Silicon photonic interconnects offer a promising solution to meeting the ever growing demand for more efficient I/O bandwidth density. We report an ultralow power 80 Gb/s arrayed silicon photonic transceiver for dense, large bandwidth inter/intrachip interconnects. Low parasitic microsolder-based hybrid bonding enables close integration of silicon photonic array devices optimized on a 130 nm silicon-on-insulator CMOS platform with CMOS very large scale integration circuits optimized on a 40 nm silicon CMOS platform to achieve unprecedented energy efficiency. The hybrid CMOS transceiver consists of eight 10 Gb/s channels with a total consumed power below 6 mW/channel. The eight-channel wavelength division multiplexing transmitter array using cascaded tunable ring modulators demonstrated better than 100 fJ/bit energy efficiency for 10 Gb/s operation excluding the laser power and tuning power, while the eight-channel receiver array using broadband Ge p-i-n waveguide detectors show sensitivity of better than -15 dBm for a bit error rate of 10^-12 at a data rate of 10 Gb/s with energy efficiency of better than 500 fJ/bit.