Silicon photonics for telecom and data‐com applications

In recent decades,silicon photonics has attracted much attention in telecom and data-com areas.Constituted of high refractive-index contrast waveguides on silicon-on-insulator(SOI),a variety of integrated photonic passive and active devices have been implemented supported by excellent optical properties of silicon in the mid-infrared spectrum.The main advantage of the silicon photonics is the ability to use complementary metal oxide semiconductor(CMOS)process-compatible fabrication technologies,resulting in high-volume production at low cost.On the other hand,explosively growing traffic in the telecom,data center and high-performance computer demands the data flow to have high speed,wide bandwidth,low cost,and high energy-efficiency,as well as the photonics and electronics to be integrated for ultra-fast data transfer in networks.In practical applications,silicon photonics started with optical interconnect transceivers in the data-com first,and has been now extended to innovative applications such as multi-port optical switches in the telecom network node and integrated optical phased arrays(OPAs)in light detection and ranging(LiDAR).This paper overviews the progresses of silicon photonics from four points reflecting the recent advances mentioned above.CMOS-based silicon photonic platform technologies,applications to optical transceiver in the data-com network,applications to multi-port optical switches in the telecom network and applications to OPA in LiDAR system.

A pair of integrated optoelectronic transceiving chips for optical interconnects

In this Letter, a pair of integrated optoelectronic transceiving chips is proposed. They are constructed by integrating a vertical cavity surface emitting laser unit above a positive-intrinsic-negative photodetector unit. One of the transceiving chips emits light at the wavelength of 848.1 nm with a threshold current of 0.8 mA and a slope efficiency of 0.81 W/A. It receives light between 801 and 814 nm with a quantum efficiency of higher than 70%. On its counterpart, the other one of the transceiving chips emits light at the wavelength of 805.3 nm with a threshold current of 1.1 mA and a slope efficiency of 0.86 W/A. It receives light between 838 and 855 nm with a quantum efficiency of higher than 70%. The proposed pair of integrated optoelectronic transceiving chips can work full-duplex with each other, and they can be applied to single fiber bidirectional optical interconnects.

Power-aware transceiver design for half-duplex bidirectional chip-to-chip optical interconnects

A power-aware transceiver for half-duplex bidirectional chip-to-chip optical interconnects has been designed and fabricated in a 0.13 μm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor （CMOS） technology. The transceiver can detect the presence and absence of received signals and saves 55% power in Rx enabled mode and 45% in Tx enabled mode. The chip occupies an area of 1.034 mm2 and achieves a 3-dB bandwidth of 6 GHz and 7 GHz in Tx and Rx modes, respectively. The disabled outputs for the Tx and Rx modes are isolated with 180 dB and 139 dB, respectively, from the enabled outputs. Clear eye diagrams are obtained at 4.25 Gbps for both the Tx and Rx modes.