III-V-on-Silicon Photonic Transceivers for Radio-Over-Fiber Links

The emergence of the fifth generation wireless networks (5G) and the Internet of Things drives the research on radio access networks. Future wireless networks aim to deliver a dramatic increase in bandwidth to an ever increasing amount of connected devices. To realize such a vision, advanced optical transceivers that link the base-station and the antennas will be required. In this paper, we present the first demonstration of an integrated silicon photonic radio-over-fiber transmitter and receiver, consisting of a directly modulated III-V-on-silicon distributed feedback laser and a Ge-on-Si waveguide photodiode cointegrated with a linear SiGe Bipolar CMOS (BiCMOS) transimpedance amplifier, respectively. Transmission of a high-spectral-efficiency long-term evolution 20 MHz bandwidth 120 Mbit/s 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (64-QAM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signal on a 3.5 and 5 GHz carrier over 5 km of standard single mode fiber is demonstrated. We further demonstrate the transmission of 16 Gbps 16-QAM data on a 20 GHz carrier over a 5 km link with a received rms error vector magnitude of 7%.