RoF System Based on an III-V-on-Silicon Transceiver With a Transfer-Printed PD

A full-duplex analog radio-over-fiber (RoF) system using an ultra-compact integrated III-V-on-silicon transceiver is proposed. The downstream link transmitter is realized by a 15-GHz C-band silicon ring modulator, and the upstream link receiver is constructed based on transfer printing an 11.5-GHz O-band III-V PD with a responsivity of ~0.5 A/W. Since the transfer-printed III-V PD is transparent to the C-band downstream signal, the III-V PD is directly placed on top of the grating coupler without affecting the downstream signal, which reduces the footprint of the transceiver and also enables bidirectional transmission of the C-band and O-band signals in the same optical fiber. With the integrated transceiver, an error vector magnitude (EVM) of less than 6% is achieved for the transmission of X-band 16-QAM downstream and upstream signals with 1-Gbps data rate through a 5-km RoF link.