Abstract
The bandwidth requirement of wireline communications has increased exponentially because of the ever-increasing demand for data centers and high-performance computing systems. However, it becomes difficult to satisfy the requirement with legacy electrical links which suffer from frequency-dependent losses due to skin effects, dielectric losses, channel reflections, and crosstalk, resulting in a severe bandwidth limitation. In order to overcome this challenge, it is necessary to introduce optical communication technology, which has been mainly used for long-reach communications, such as long-haul networks and metropolitan area networks, to the medium- and short-reach communication systems. However, there still remain important issues to be resolved to facilitate the adoption of the optical technologies. The most critical challenges are the energy efficiency and the cost competitiveness as compared to the legacy copper-based electrical communications. One possible solution is silicon photonics which has long been investigated by a number of research groups. Despite inherent incompatibility of silicon with the photonic world, silicon photonics is promising and is the only solution that can leverage the mature complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies. Silicon photonics can be utilized in not only wireline communications but also countless sensor applications. This paper introduces a brief review of silicon photonics first and subsequently describes the history, overview, and categorization of the CMOS IC technology for high-speed photo-detection without enumerating the complex circuital expressions and terminologies.
Highlights
Today, people’s everyday lives are connected online, i.e., anyone can access or share data worldwide at any time and place
A typical PD can be wire-bonded to a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) chip and the output of the TIA is connected to a trace on a printed circuit board interface with high-speed end-launch connectors
After the cascaded CS stage, continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE) is used to compensate the high-frequency loss owing to the limited bandwidth of a spatially modulated PD, to compensate the high-frequency loss owing to the limited bandwidth of a spatially modulated PD, which is monolithically integrated in a single chip
Summary
People’s everyday lives are connected online, i.e., anyone can access or share data worldwide at any time and place. Most people today are familiar with accessing streaming media from YouTube, and using social network services and cloud services for personal purposes. Two important factors contributing to this revolution are the development of high-performance computing systems and data communication systems which are closely interdependent. The requirement of high-performance data communication systems is being emphasized more than ever, because of ever-increasing demand for data throughput in every computing system. The forecast of data throughput demands is provided by Cisco, one of Sensors 2017, 17, 1962; doi:10.3390/s17091962 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors. 22 of of the leading companies specializing in networking equipment.
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