Design of a 50-Gb/s Hybrid Integrated Si-Photonic Optical Link in 16-nm FinFET

This article presents an electro-absorption modulator (EAM)-based single-mode (SM) 50-Gb/s non return to zero (NRZ) Si-photonic optical link in a 16-nm FinFET. The EAM device is modeled to include its electrical and optical properties. The transmitter (TX) uses T-coil based over-peaking to improve modulation efficiency and relax transimpedance amplifier's (TIA's) bandwidth and noise requirement. The receiver (RX) uses a three-stage TIA with T-coils to improve bandwidth. The link sensitivity is -10.9-dBm optical modulation amplitude (OMA) at bit error rate (BER) <; 10^-12 with 2-dB link margin at 50 Gb/s. The combined power efficiency of the RX, TX, and clocking is 3.16 pJ/bit and the external laser consumes 1.15 pJ/bit with 10% wall-plug efficiency.