8 research outputs found
Silicon Photonics Transmitter with SOA and Semiconductor Mode-Locked Laser
We demonstrate a complete Silicon Photonics WDM link relying on a single
section semiconductor mode-locked laser and a single SOA to support up to 12
multiplexed channels with a bit error rate of 1e-12 at serial data rates of 14
Gbps without channel pre-emphasis, equalization or forward error correction.
Individual channels reach error free operation at 25 Gbps and multi-channel
operation at 25 Gbps is shown to be compatible with standard 7% overhead hard
decision forward error correction. Silicon Photonics transmitter and receiver
chips are hybridly integrated with driver and receiver electronics. A detailed
link model is derived and verified. Particular emphasis is placed on accurate
system level modeling of laser RIN, SOA amplified spontaneous emission noise
and receiver noise. The impact of the electrical receiver bandwidth and
non-Gaussian statistics on level dependent amplified spontaneous emission noise
are investigated in detail. The channel count scalability as limited by SOA
saturation is further analyzed taking cross gain modulation and four wave
mixing into account. While semiconductor mode-locked lasers have been
identified as a potential light source for low cost Datacom WDM transceivers
for some time, this is, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive
investigation of the overall link budget in a Silicon Photonics implementation
showing this technology to be a credible contender for low latency datacenter
interconnects