Silicon Photonic Transceiver Circuits With Microring Resonator Bias-Based Wavelength Stabilization in 65 nm CMOS Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Photonic interconnects are a promising technology to meet the bandwidth demands of next-generation high-performance computing systems. This paper presents silicon photonic transceiver circuits for a microring resonator-based optical interconnect architecture in a 1 V standard 65 nm CMOS technology. The transmitter circuits incorporate high-swing (2 Vpp and 4 V pp drivers with nonlinear pre-emphasis and automatic bias-based tuning for resonance wavelength stabilization. An optical forwarded-clock adaptive inverter-based transimpedance amplifier (TIA) receiver trades off power for varying link budgets by employing an on-die eye monitor and scaling the TIA supply for the required sensitivity. At 5 Gb/s operation, the 4 Vpp transmitter achieves 12.7 dB extinction ratio with 4.04 mW power consumption, excluding laser power, when driving wire-bonded modulators designed in a 130 nm SOI process, while a 0.28 nm tuning range is obtained at 6.8 W/GHz efficiency with the bias-based tuning scheme implemented with the 2V pp transmitter. When tested with a wire-bonded 150 fF p-i-n photodetector, the receiver achieves - 9 dBm sensitivity at a BER=10 -9 and consumes 2.2 mW at 8 Gb/s. Testing with an on-die test structure emulating a low-capacitance waveguide photodetector yields 17 App sensitivity at 10 Gb/s and more than 40% power reduction with higher input current levels. 1966-2012 IEEE.

published proceedings

  • IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS

altmetric score

  • 3

author list (cited authors)

  • Li, C., Bai, R., Shafik, A., Tabasy, E. Z., Wang, B., Tang, G., ... Palermo, S.

citation count

  • 85

complete list of authors

  • Li, Cheng||Bai, Rui||Shafik, Ayman||Tabasy, Ehsan Zhian||Wang, Binhao||Tang, Geng||Ma, Chao||Chen, Chin-Hui||Peng, Zhen||Fiorentino, Marco||Beausoleil, Raymond G||Chiang, Patrick||Palermo, Samuel

publication date

  • June 2014