Imec achieve data rate of 200 Gbps using SiGe BiCMOS optical receiver
Date: 06/10/2023
A team of researchers led by Peter Ossieur from IDLab presented an optical receiver achieving across data rate of 200 Gbps at European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) took place in Glasgow this week. IDLab is an imec research group at Ghent University. This team achieved a gross data rate of 200 Gbps by co-integrating a traveling-wave SiGe BiCMOS transimpedance amplifier with a silicon photonics Ge photodetector. This approach offers speed and scalability.
Optical interconnect and silicon photonics is the only way out to achieve high data speeds on wired networks and inter processor communications. Researchers are trying to achieve highest possible speeds even on optical channels.
“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 imec’s IDLab and professor at Ghent University.
“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 team demonstrates their result in a setup with a silicon photonics Ge 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 200Gbps-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 200Gbps, a key requirement for upcoming pluggable and co-packaged optics. .”
News Source: Imec
