A Dual-Polarization Silicon-Photonic Coherent Transmitter Supporting 552 Gb/s/wavelength

Coherent optical links improve spectral efficiency over their intensity-modulation direct-detect (IM-DD) counterparts using advanced modulation schemes such as quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), and by utilizing dual polarization (DP) of light. This increase in spectral efficiency also leads to stringent requirements for the link components. The transmitter (TX) must simultaneously achieve high bandwidth (BW), linearity, output swing, and reliability. In this article, we present a silicon-photonic Mach-Zehnder modulator-based optical TX on an Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) process, and linear, high-swing SiGe drivers on 130-nm BiCMOS process. The output stage of the driver uses a voltage breakdown enhancement technique to ensure the reliability of the TX. A resistor-based capacitor splitting technique is introduced, and aided by other methods such as zero-peaking and degeneration, the targeted gain, BW, swing, and linearity for the driver are realized. The driver achieves a differential swing of 6 V peak-to-peak, a total harmonic distortion (THD) of 3.6%, and more than 40 GHz of electrical BW. Co-designed and co-packaged with the silicon-photonic modulators, the TX achieves 272 Gb/s/wavelength with DP-16 QAM at 6-V peak-to-peak driver swing and exceeds 0.5 Tb/s/wavelength data rates with DP-16 QAM at 2.4-V peak-to-peak driver swing. The low-cost, compact, and all-Si/SiGe design matches the required optical SNR performance of LiNbO3 modulators with III-V drivers at 34 Gbaud.