22.4 A 24Gb/s 0.71pJ/b Si-photonic source-synchronous receiver with adaptive equalization and microring wavelength stabilization

Abstract

Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical interconnect architectures based on microring resonator devices offer a low-area and energy-efficient approach to realize both high-speed modulation and WDM with high-speed transmit-side ring modulators and high-Q receive-side drop filters [1-3]. While CMOS optical front-ends have been previously developed that support data-rates in excess of 20Gb/s, these designs often do not offer the retiming and deserialization functions required to form a complete link [1,4]. Furthermore, along with the requirements of a sensitive energy-efficient receiver front-end with low-complexity clocking, wavelength stabilization control is necessary to compensate for the fabrication tolerances and thermal sensitivity of microring drop filters. In this work, a 24Gb/s hybrid-integrated microring receiver is demonstrated the incorporates the following key advances: 1) a low-complexity optically-clocked source-synchronous receiver with LC injection-locked oscillator (ILO) jitter filtering; 2) a large input-stage feedback resistor TIA cascaded with an adaptively-tuned continuous-time linear equalizer (CTLE) for improved sensitivity and bandwidth; 3) a receive-side thermal tuning loop that stabilizes the microring drop filter resonance wavelength with minimal impact on receiver sensitivity.