Ultra-efficient 10Gb/s hybrid integrated silicon photonic transmitter and receiver

Abstract

Using low parasitic microsolder bumping, we hybrid integrated efficient photonic devices from different platforms with advanced 40 nm CMOS VLSI circuits to build ultra-low power silicon photonic transmitters and receivers for potential applications in high performance inter/intra-chip interconnects. We used a depletion racetrack ring modulator with improved electro-optic efficiency to allow stepper optical photo lithography for reduced fabrication complexity. Integrated with a low power cascode 2 V CMOS driver, the hybrid silicon photonic transmitter achieved better than 7 dB extinction ratio for 10 Gbps operation with a record low power consumption of 1.35 mW. A received power penalty of about 1 dB was measured for a BER of 10(-12) compared to an off-the-shelf lightwave LiNOb3 transmitter, which comes mostly from the non-perfect extinction ratio. Similarly, a Ge waveguide detector fabricated using 130 nm SOI CMOS process was integrated with low power VLSI circuits using hybrid bonding. The all CMOS hybrid silicon photonic receiver achieved sensitivity of -17 dBm for a BER of 10(-12) at 10 Gbps, consuming an ultra-low power of 3.95 mW (or 395 fJ/bit in energy efficiency). The scalable hybrid integration enables continued photonic device improvements by leveraging advanced CMOS technologies with maximum flexibility, which is critical for developing ultra-low power high performance photonic interconnects for future computing systems.