Silicon Photonics Transmitter with SOA and Semiconductor Mode-Locked Laser

摘要

We demonstrate a complete Silicon Photonics WDM link relying on a singlesection semiconductor mode-locked laser and a single SOA to support up to 12multiplexed channels with a bit error rate of 1e-12 at serial data rates of 14Gbps without channel pre-emphasis, equalization or forward error correction.Individual channels reach error free operation at 25 Gbps and multi-channeloperation at 25 Gbps is shown to be compatible with standard 7% overhead harddecision forward error correction. Silicon Photonics transmitter and receiverchips are hybridly integrated with driver and receiver electronics. A detailedlink model is derived and verified. Particular emphasis is placed on accuratesystem level modeling of laser RIN, SOA amplified spontaneous emission noiseand receiver noise. The impact of the electrical receiver bandwidth andnon-Gaussian statistics on level dependent amplified spontaneous emission noiseare investigated in detail. The channel count scalability as limited by SOAsaturation is further analyzed taking cross gain modulation and four wavemixing into account. While semiconductor mode-locked lasers have beenidentified as a potential light source for low cost Datacom WDM transceiversfor some time, this is, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensiveinvestigation of the overall link budget in a Silicon Photonics implementationshowing this technology to be a credible contender for low latency datacenterinterconnects.