Open AccessDemonstration of a High Extinction Ratio Monolithic CMOS Integrated Nanophotonic Transmitter and 16 Gb/s Optical Link
Author(s) -
Douglas M. Gill,
Jonathan E. Proesel,
Chi Xiong,
Jason S. Orcutt,
Jessie C. Rosenberg,
Marwan H. Khater,
Tymon Barwicz,
Solomon Assefa,
Steven M. Shank,
Carol Reinholm,
John Ellis-Monaghan,
Edward Kiewra,
Swetha Kamlapurkar,
Chris M. Breslin,
William M. J. Green,
Wilfried Haensch,
Yurii A. Vlasov
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
ieee journal of selected topics in quantum electronics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.131
H-Index - 159
eISSN - 1558-4542
pISSN - 1077-260X
DOI - 10.1109/jstqe.2014.2381468
Subject(s) - engineered materials, dielectrics and plasmas , photonics and electrooptics
We present a 16-Gb/s transmitter composed of a stacked voltage-mode CMOS driver and periodic-loaded reverse biased pn junction Mach-Zehnder modulator. The transmitter shows 9-dB extinction ratio and 10.3-pJ/bit power consumption and operates with 1.3 μm light. Penalties as low as 0.5 dB were seen as compared to a 25-Gb/s LiNbO3 transmitter with both a monolithic metal-semiconductor-metal receiver and a reference receiver at 16-Gb/s operation. We also present an analytic expression for relative transmitter penalty (RTP), which allows one to quickly assess the system impact of design parameters such as peak-to-peak modulator drive voltage, modulator figure of merit, and transmitter extinction ratio to determine the circumstances under which a stacked CMOS cascode driver is desirable.