Open AccessUltra-low-energy all-CMOS modulator integrated with driver
Author(s) -
Xuezhe Zheng,
Jon Lexau,
Ying Luo,
Hiren Thacker,
Thierry Pinguet,
Attila Mekis,
Guoliang Li,
Jing Shi,
Philip Amberg,
Nathaniel Pinckney,
Kannan Raj,
Ron Ho,
J. E. Cunningham,
Ashok V. Krishnamoorthy
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - Uncategorized
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.18.003059
Subject(s) - cmos , electrical engineering , materials science , transmitter , silicon on insulator , optoelectronics , silicon , engineering , channel (broadcasting)
We report the first sub-picojoule per bit (400fJ/bit) operation of a silicon modulator intimately integrated with a driver circuit and embedded in a clocked digital transmitter. We show a wall-plug power efficiency below 400microW/Gbps for a 130nm SOI CMOS carrier-depletion ring modulator flip-chip integrated to a 90nm bulk Si CMOS driver circuit. We also demonstrate stable error-free transmission of over 1.5 petabits of data at 5Gbps over 3.5 days using the integrated modulator without closed-loop ring resonance tuning. Small signal measurements of the CMOS ring modulator, sans circuit, showed a 3dB bandwidth in excess of 15GHz at 1V of reverse bias, indicating that further increases in transmission rate and reductions of energy-per-bit is possible while retaining compatibility with CMOS drive voltages.