11 Oct Optical receiver hits 200 Gigabits per second
From artificial intelligence to cloud computing and 5G: data-intensive applications are finding their way into different industries and many aspects of our daily lives. To keep up with today’s and especially tomorrow’s data-processing demands, data centers will need optical communication networks that perform at an ever increasing speed. A team of researchers from IDLab, an imec research group at Ghent University, Belgium, now presented an optical receiver achieving a gross data rate of 200 Gbps. “Currently, the most performant optical datacom transceivers operate at speeds up to 800 Gbps, using for example 8 x 100 Gbps channels, but the field is envisioning doubling the channel capacity to 200 Gbps to reduce the transceiver complexity, cost and power consumption while improving manufacturing yield,” says Peter Ossieur, program manager for high-speed transceivers at the IDLab and professor at Ghent University.
Fast and scalable
Ossieur and his team of researchers work towards high-speed integrated circuits for photonics applications. His team has now achieved a gross data rate of 200 Gbps by co-integrating a traveling-wave Silicon-Germanium (SiGe) bipolar CMOS (BiCMOS) transimpedance amplifier with a silicon photonics Germanium photodetector. Aside from the speed, the use of mainstream SiGe BiCMOS makes the technology more scalable and therefore affordable, explain the researchers. “An alternative to reach such speeds are InP electronics, which is a more expensive and less scalable technology,” says Ossieur. “SiGe BiCMOS allows us to integrate more functionalities and the chips can also be manufactured at higher volumes.”
The next generation
The team demonstrates their result in a setup with a silicon photonics Germanium photodetector from imec’s integrated silicon photonics platform (iSiPP), targeted to the telecom, datacom and medical diagnostics industries. Joris Van Campenhout, fellow and program director optical I/O at imec, says the new optical receiver represents one of the many steps imec is taking to ready its silicon photonics platforms for demanding 200-Gbps-and-beyond applications: “These latest results represent one more data point showcasing the capability of imec’s silicon photonics platform (iSiPP) to operate at lane rates of 200 Gbps, a key requirement for upcoming plugable and co-packaged optics.”
Close-up of Imec’s SiGe-BiCMOS-based optical receiver, which achieves a gross data rate of 200 Gbps. Image: Imec
The work received support through European Union’s Horizon 2020 projects POETICS (No 871769) and NEBULA (No 871658) and was presented at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) 2023 in Glasgow.
Source and image: www.imec-int.com
