News: Optoelectronics
3 October 2023
imec presents SiGe BiCMOS optical receiver achieving gross data rate of 200Gbps
At the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2023) in Glasgow, Scotland, UK (2–4 October), researchers from IDLab, a team at Ghent University, Belgium from Leuven-based microelectronics research center imec, have presented an optical receiver achieving a gross data rate of 200Gbps. Their approach, combining a SiGe BiCMOS traveling-wave electronics integrated circuit and a silicon photonics germanium photodetector, offers not only speed but also scalability: two prerequisites for meeting exploding data-rate needs.
“Currently, the most performant optical datacom transceivers operate at speeds up to 800Gbps, using for example 8 x 100Gbps channels, but the field is envisioning doubling the channel capacity to 200Gbps 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.
Ossieur is leading a team of researchers working towards high-speed integrated circuits for photonics applications. His team has now achieved a gross data rate of 200Gbps by co-integrating a traveling-wave SiGe BiCMOS transimpedance amplifier (TIA) with a silicon photonics Ge photodetector.
Aside from the speed, the use of mainstream SiGe BiCMOS makes the technology more scalable and therefore affordable. “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.”
If optical transceivers are to keep up with exploding data rates, all building blocks need to handle higher speeds. The team demonstrates their result in a setup with a silicon photonics Ge photodetector from imec’s integrated silicon photonics platform (iSiPP), targeted at the telecom, datacom and medical diagnostics industries.
“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,” says Joris Van Campenhout, fellow & program director optical I/O at imec. “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,” he adds.
The work received support through European Union’s Horizon 2020 projects POETICS (No 871769) and NEBULA (No 871658).
