400-Gb/s optical transmitter and receiver modules for on-board interconnects using polymer waveguide arrays

Abstract

We propose 400-Gb/s (16 × 25 Gb/s) optical transmitter and receiver modules for on-board interconnects using polymer waveguide (PWG) arrays. Four four-channel vertical cavity surface emitting laser and PIN photodiode arrays are used in the optical transmitter and receiver modules. A 16-channel PWG array with a length of 140 mm and a pitch of 62.5 μm is used as a short-reach optical signal transmission medium in the module. The 25-Gb/s optical eye diagrams of the all output channels utilize PWG transmissions and exhibit good performance in the transmitter module, with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of over 8.01, peak-to-peak time jitter below 11.70 ps, and mask margin of over 31.5%. In the best-performance channel of the receiver module, the peak-to-peak time jitter and SNR of the eye diagram are 10.34 ps and 10.76, respectively, and the receiver sensitivity is approximately −2.6-dBm under a bit error rate of 10−12. The optical transmitter and receiver modules utilizing PWG transmissions were designed and fabricated to realize 400-Gb/s on-board interconnects.