Design Considerations for Energy Efficient DWDM PAM4 Transceivers Employing Avalanche Photodiodes Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • AbstractAn effective approach to increase perfiber bandwidth is to combine perwavelength fourlevel pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) with dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM). Silicon photonic transceivers based on microring resonator modulators and drop filters can allow for an efficient realization of this. Utilizing avalanche photodiodes (APDs) in the receiver frontends of these transceivers can significantly improve sensitivity, allowing for reduced source laser power and overall improved power efficiency. This paper analyzes the opticalmodulation amplitude (OMA) sensitivity of these APDbased PAM4 receivers in a silicon photonic DWDM link. A comprehensive link budget is considered that takes into account various system losses and relevant noise sources. Modeling with a developed APD that has a maximum 230GHz gainbandwidth product predicts sensitivity improvements at 32 to 64Gbs1 PAM4 ranging from 9.8 to 12dB relative to a conventional pin photodiode. Scaling the APD gainbandwidth to 310GHz allows support of 112Gbs1 with 13.2dBm OMA sensitivity at a BER of with an APD gain of 10. Utilizing the presented architecture, link budget analysis predicts a 9.5x reduction in laser power with APDs and that 38mW source laser optical power can support a fourchannel DWDM link operating at an aggregate 448Gbs1 datarate.

published proceedings

  • LASER & PHOTONICS REVIEWS

author list (cited authors)

  • Kumar, A., Huang, Z., Zeng, X., Wang, B., Liang, D. i., Sorin, W., ... Palermo, S.

citation count

  • 11

complete list of authors

  • Kumar, Ankur||Huang, Zhihong||Zeng, Xiaoge||Wang, Binhao||Liang, Di||Sorin, Wayne||Fiorentino, Marco||Beausoleil, Raymond G||Palermo, Samuel

publication date

  • September 2020

publisher