Electronic-photonic convergence for 100Gb/s silicon photonics transmitters

The interest in developing high-performance optical modulator to meet the growing demands of data processing speed has increased over the last decade. While there have been significant research efforts in developing standalone silicon modulators, works on integrating those with electronics is limited, which is necessary for the practical implementation of short-reach optical interconnects. In contrast to previous work in the field where electronic–photonic integration was mostly limited to the physical coupling approach, we have introduced a new design philosophy, where photonics and electronics must be considered as a single integrated system in order to tackle the demanding technical challenges of this field. In this work, I shall present our recent 100Gb/s silicon photonics transmitter, where photonic and electronic devices are co-designed synergistically in terms of device packaging, power efficiency, operation speed, footprint and modulation format.