A Monolithic 25-Gb/s Transceiver With Photonic Ring Modulators and Ge Detectors in a 130-nm CMOS SOI Process

A fully-integrated, silicon photonic transceiver is demonstrated in a silicon-on-insulator process using photonic microring resonator modulators for low power consumption. The trade-offs between bandwidth and extinction ratio are discussed and motivate the use of transmit pre-emphasis for ring modulators to increase the interconnect data rate. The transmitter and receiver is demonstrated to data rates of 25 Gb/s with a BER of 10 ^-12. The total power consumption of the transceiver is 256 mW and demonstrates a link efficiency of 10.2 pJ/bit excluding laser power. At 25 Gb/s, the driver operates at 7.2 pJ/bit.