Optoelectronic Module with Integrated Transceiver and Mux-Demux for Optical Interconnect Applications

The design, development and improvtableement in electronic devices and components have led to the further miniaturization of the system devices and their interconnecting interfaces. Hence, reducing the size of the transmitter (Tx) chips, receiver (Rx) chips and associated components play an important role in designing a reduced/small sized optoelectronic modules for optical interconnect applications. Some of the associated components include multiplexer, demultiplexer, clock and data recovery circuits (CDR), etc. Therefore, in this paper we present an optoelectronic module with integrated transceiver (Tx-Rx) and multiplexer-demultiplexer (mux-demux) with the aim of reducing the total area occupied by the chips. The topology is based on sharing common blocks between Tx and Rx as well as Mux and Demux for saving chip area, power consumption and board area. Based on this topology, a design of 2-channel Tx/Mux and Rx/Demux is realized in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The measurement results show clear output eye diagrams at 2.5 Gbps with the voltage swing of 375 mVpp from the Rx/Demux. The combined solution would save the chip area and power consumption of 10% and 23%, respectively, compared to discrete circuits implementations. Using this topology, a high efficient bidirectional optical link could be implemented in modern computer and other green IT applications.