Design considerations for multi chip module silicon photonic transceivers

High bandwidth density silicon photonic interconnects offer the potential to address the massive increase in bandwidth demands for data center traffic and high performance computing. One of the major challenges in realizing silicon photonics transceivers is the integration and packing of photonic ICs (PIC) with electronic ICs (EIC). This paper presents our version one, 2.5D integrated multi-chip module (MCM) transceiver for 4 channel wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) operation, targeting 10 Gbps per channel. We identify five key areas critical to successful integration of MCM transceivers, which we have used in developing our version two MCM transceiver: integration architecture, equivalent circuit model development, PIC to EIC interface modelling, MCM I/O design, and design for assembly.