Abstract
Ultrahigh-speed optical interconnects are essential to future cloud computing. Further increase in optical transmission speed has been hindered by power consumption and limited bandwidth resources, for which integrated optical transceivers using advanced modulation formats, such as pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM), are a promising solution. We report 80 Gb/s PAM operation of a silicon microring modulator (MRM) with an ultralow power consumption below 7 fJ/bit. We also report the first demonstration of PAM-8 modulation of MRMs in the Gb/s order, achieving error-free capability at 45 Gb/s, using 1 fJ/bit. To the best of our knowledge, these results feature the lowest power consumption, per transmitted bit, ever demonstrated at such high data rates. We further demonstrate PAM data transmission up to 64 Gb/s over 5 km. Simultaneous achievement of ultrafast modulation and ultralow power consumption is a critical step toward next-generation optical interconnects.
Highlights
Transition to next-generation optical interconnects is driven by the demand for ultrahigh-speed data transmission in computing systems [1] and data centers for the cloud [2]
We examine the performance of the modulator by first considering the pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM) eye diagrams collected by the real-time oscilloscope (RTO), as shown in Fig. 4, representing examples of the data captured for bit error rate (BER) measurements
We have demonstrated ultrahigh-speed, ultralow-power PAM operation with a silicon photonic modulator
Summary
Transition to next-generation optical interconnects is driven by the demand for ultrahigh-speed data transmission in computing systems [1] and data centers for the cloud [2] Key enablers of this transition have been identified as further advances in photonic integration and high-speed, low-power complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. Very limited experimental results have been reported for highspeed MRMs with high-order modulation formats, including 56 Gb∕s [10] QPSK and 24 Gb∕s PAM-4 [11]. These devices have relatively high power consumptions in the range of a few tens to hundreds of fJ/bit. We examine higher-order modulation of an optimized silicon MRM with the direct detection scheme for ultrahigh-speed optical interconnects.
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