A monolithic 56 Gb/s silicon photonic pulse-amplitude modulation transmitter

TL;DR

This paper presents the first fully monolithic silicon photonic PAM-4 transmitter operating at 56 Gb/s, demonstrating error-free transmission up to 50 Gb/s, highlighting silicon photonics' potential for ultrahigh data rate optical interconnects.

Contribution

It introduces the first monolithically integrated silicon photonic PAM-4 transmitter at 56 Gb/s with optimized modulators and CMOS drivers, advancing high-speed optical communication technology.

Findings

Achieved 56 Gb/s PAM-4 transmission

Error-free transmission up to 50 Gb/s without FEC

Demonstrated monolithic integration of modulators and drivers

Abstract

Silicon photonics promises to address the challenges for next-generation short-reach optical interconnects. Growing bandwidth demand in hyper-scale data centers and high-performance computing motivates the development of faster and more-efficient silicon photonics links. While it is challenging to raise the serial line rate, further scaling of the data rate can be realized by, for example, increasing the number of parallel fibers, increasing the number of wavelengths per fiber, and using multi-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM). Among these approaches, PAM has a unique advantage because it does not require extra lasers or a costly overhaul of optical fiber cablings within the existing infrastructure. Here, we demonstrate the first fully monolithically integrated silicon photonic four-level PAM (PAM-4) transmitter operating at 56 Gb/s and demonstrate error-free transmission (bit-error-rate < 10$^{-12}$) up to 50 Gb/s without forward error correction. The superior PAM-4 waveform is enabled by optimization of silicon traveling wave modulators and monolithic integration of the CMOS driver circuits. Our results show that monolithic silicon photonics technology is a promising platform for future ultrahigh data rate optical interconnects.