Low-Power 16 x 10 Gb/s Bi-Directional Single Chip CMOS Optical Transceivers Operating at ≪ 5 mW/Gb/s/link

Abstract

We report here on a parallel optical transceiver based on a single 0.13 mum CMOS amplifier chip with 16 transmitter and 16 receiver channels. The transceiver is designed to support very low-power, chip-to-chip optical data buses on printed circuit boards at data rates up to 10 Gb/s/channel. Optical interfaces to the chip are provided by 16-channel photodiode (PD) and VCSEL arrays directly flip-chip soldered to the CMOS IC. The resulting complete transceivers, or optochips, are low-cost, low-profile highly-integrated chip-scale components. The packaging approach, dense hybrid-integration of optical devices with CMOS, facilitates further scaling to even larger 2-D arrays for future massively parallel optical data buses. Comparison with a previously reported high-speed transceiver Optochip is provided to provide insight into the design space of dense CMOS-based parallel optical transceivers.