A PAM4 Dielectric Waveguide Link in 28 nm CMOS

Abstract

This work presents a dielectric waveguide communication link at 135 GHz, reaching 27 Gb/s non-return to-zero (NRZ) communication without any equalization at a bit-error-rate (BER) below 10−12 and up to 50 Gb/s 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM4) over 3 m of fiber at a BER below 10−6 when equalization is applied. This work is the first to break the 25 Gb/s barrier at distances of 1 m and above. These results are achieved by combining a low power, multilevel mm-wave transceiver with a coupler on printed circuit board (PCB) and a fiber design optimized for low dispersion.