2.5D co-packaged optical I/O chipsets on a SiON/Si interposer for 4 $\times$ 100G optical interconnection

TL;DR

This paper presents a SiON/Si-based optical interposer with integrated high-bandwidth optical I/O chipsets, demonstrating a 400-Gb/s transceiver with reliable high-speed data transmission suitable for high-performance computing clusters.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel SiON/Si optical interposer architecture integrating scalable waveguide routing and WDM with flip-chip active device integration, enabling high-speed, energy-efficient optical I/O.

Findings

Achieved 400-Gb/s data transmission with clear eye diagrams.

Demonstrated low-loss, thermally efficient optical interposer architecture.

Validated reliable high-speed data transfer in experimental setup.

Abstract

Optical I/O technologies have emerged as a potential industrial solution for high-performance data interconnection in AI/ML computing acceleration. While optical I/Os are deployed at the edge of computational chips by co-packaged optics (CPO), flexible and high-performance integration architectures need to be explored to address system-level challenges. In this work, we present and experimentally demonstrate a SiON/Si-based optical interposer that integrates high-bandwidth and energy-efficient optical I/O chipsets. High-performance photonic and electronic components are co-packaged on the interposer, leading to low-loss, signal-integrity-friendly, and thermally efficient characteristics. The optical interposer incorporates low-loss SiON photonic circuits to realize scalable waveguide routing and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) with polarization-insensitive operation and high fabrication tolerance, while supporting flip-chip integration with InP-based active devices, including electro-absorption modulated lasers (EMLs) and photodetectors (PDs). Based on this architecture, a 400-Gb/s single-fiber optical transceiver is implemented and experimentally evaluated. Clear eye diagrams and high receiver sensitivity demonstrate reliable high-speed data transmission, which offers scalable, high-bandwidth optical I/Os in future high-performance computational clusters.