https://cdn.specpick.com/images/photonics/profa_0.JPG712370
At this week’s OFC 2017, Imec is exhibiting a 896 Gb/s silicon photonics transceiver of just a few mm2, targeting future Tb/s optical links. This achievement highlights the scalability of imec’s iSiPP50G silicon photonics platform, paving the way for next-generation short-reach optical interconnects.
Driven by exponential demand for interconnect bandwidth in datacenters, single-mode optical transceivers will need to scale to Tb/s capacity and be tightly integrated with network switches. Silicon photonics (SiPh) has been identified as a promising technology platform to realize such aggressive bandwidth and integration targets, substantially going beyond 100 Gb/s technology available today. In the work presented at OFC, imec combines recently developed 50 GHz active optical components with a multi-core fiber interface to showcase a proof-of-concept 896 Gb/s spatial-division multiplexing SiPh transceiver.
The bi-directional 896 Gb/s silicon photonics transceiver combines dense arrays of 56 Gb/s Germanium-Silicon (GeSi) electro-absorption modulators and GeSi waveguide photodetectors with a multi-core fiber interface. It comprises arrays of 16 GeSi electro-absorption modulators (EAM) and 16 GeSi photodetectors (PD), implemented with 100µm channel pitch on a single silicon chip. Both the EAM and PD devices are realized in a single GeSi epitaxial growth step, allowing a simple fabrication scheme. The chip co-integrates optical power splitters to feed a single laser source to the transmitter channels, and a dense array of fiber grating couplers to interface with a pitch reducing optical fiber array (PROFA), provided and packaged by Chiral Photonics.
The GeSi EAM and PD components are available for evaluation by companies and academia through imec’s silicon photonics prototyping service and the iSiPP50G multi-project wafer (MPW) service provided by Europractice. The iSiPP50G platform includes a validated passive and active device library and is supported by photonic design software solutions from multiple EDA vendors, including Synopsys, Luceda Photonics and Lumerical, in current or upcoming releases.
The Europractice MPW services target datacom, telecom and sensing industries, photonic ASIC ecosystems and academia in the mentioned fields. In 2017, new MPW runs are available at four fixed tape-in dates. First closing date for registering to iSiPP50G technologies is May 5, 2017.
