Power saving bidirectional optical transceiver design and fabrication

Abstract

In this paper, a bidirectional optical transceiver module has been proposed. The module is designed such as way to have the capability to save power. The proposed transceiver for chip-to-chip optical interconnect is designed and fabricated using a 130 nm CMOS technology. The transceiver saves up to 55 and 35 % power in receiver (Rx) enabled and transmitter (Tx) enabled modes, respectively. The area of the fabricated chip is 0.97 × 0.78 mm2. We investigated the fabricated module performance by 10 Gb/s data rate and measured bit error rate less than 10−12 with −12 and −13 dBm received optical power at Tx and Rx, respectively. The clear eye-diagrams were observed at 10 Gb/s data rate with minimum input power of −13 dBm at the Rx.