Silicon Photonic Mach-Zehnder Modulator Driver for 800+Gb/s Optical Links

Abstract

High-Baud rate Si-photonic based optical systems will enable the next generation of low power optical modules for datacenter and long-reach applications. In this paper the importance of high-speed interconnect between DAC-Driver and modulator is discussed. A new solution to reduce the interconnect loss in both transmitter and receiver path is proposed. Furthermore, a new low power driver architecture is proposed which can deliver more than 4Vppd to a Si-Photonic Mach-Zehnder modulator with more than 70GHz of electrical bandwidth. The total harmonic distortion (THD) performance of the driver is measured using $100\Omega$ differential load and is better than 5% for output swings of <4Vppd at 1GHz and 5GHz. Optical eye diagram is provided and BER measurements indicate BER of better than 3e-4 for 90GBaud 168Gb/s PAM4 transmission.