An Energy-Efficient and Bandwidth-Scalable DWDM Heterogeneous Silicon Photonics Integration Platform

Abstract

Heterogeneous III-V-on-silicon photonic integration has proved to be an attractive and volume manufacturable solution that marries the merits of III-V compounds and silicon technology for various photonic integrated circuit (PIC) applications. The current main-stream Ethernet trends for larger bandwidth are pushing higher modulation baudrate or employing advanced modulation format for datacom applications. However, neither solution is likely able to significantly drive overall solution cost and energy efficiency to the best sweet spot, nor to unfold the full potential of heterogeneous integration. Here we review our innovations on a special heterogeneous III-V-on-silicon platform, and the development of a dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) transceiver. A 40-channel DWDM architecture and platform fabrication are discussed first, followed by experimental demonstration of each high-quality building block. InAs/GaAs quantum dot material is the choice for building robust multi-wavelength lasers, amplifiers, and high-speed avalanche photodetectors (APDs) which complements the more mature SiGe APDs. A metal-oxide-semiconductor capacitor phase shifter is a mission critical structure to provide athermal and efficient tuning for deinterleavers and microring resonators, and high-speed modulation. A successful 8 × 25 Gb/s link demonstration paves the way for the world's first fully-integrated DWDM PIC on Si with Terabit/s aggregated bandwidth and energy efficiency likely to ∼100 fJ/bit.