A fully-integrated optical duobinary transceiver in a 130nm SOI CMOS technology

A 5-Gb/s fully-integrated optical duobinary transceiver front-end is demonstrated in a 130-nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS technology. A photonic microring modulator is shown to support 5 Gb/s modulation through the use of duobinary electronic modulation. Duobinary modulation is proposed to mitigate opto-electronic bandwidth limitations for the photonic ring modulator. The circuit illustrates an NRZ data eye of 500 μW amplitude and consumes 115 mW of power for both the analog and digital portions of the transmitter.