(A) study on reliability of transceiver module for bidirectional optical interconnect link

Abstract

Optical interconnection is being aggressively commercialized for short-reach communication links as an alternative to alleviate bottleneck of electrical interconnections due to its advantages such as high data rate, low crosstalk, low cost, and ease of monolithic integration of optical components in high-speed data transmission. As, technology is developing the size of electronic devices is decreasing which requires small size optical modules for designing optical interconnect link between electronic devices. The realization of small size optical module requires the coalescence of optical components and TRx chips. Therefore, designing of a compact TRx chip plays an important role in reducing the size of optical modules in device-to-device, board-to-board, rack-to-rack and chip-to-chip optical interconnection links. However, reducing the size of TRx chip may increase crosstalk and heating due to the increase of power density. In this dissertation, the reliability of optical TRx modules has studied for creating stable light emission in small size optical modules for bi-directional data transmission.

First, a small-size transimpedance amplifier (TIA)-optical receiver (Rx) using two intersecting active feedback system with regulated-cascode (RGC) input stage has been designed and implemented for optical interconnects. The optical TIA-Rx chip is designed in a 0.13 μm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology and works up to 10 Gbps data rate. The TIA-Rx chip core occupies an area of 0.051 mm2 with power consumption of 16.9 mW at 1.3 V and achieves higher cost efficiency comparing to other existing state-of-the-artworks. The measured input-referred noise of optical TIA-Rx is 20 pA/√Hz with a 3-dB bandwidth (BW) of 6.9 GHz. The proposed TIA-Rx achieved a high gain-bandwidth product per DC power figure of merit of 408 GHzΩ /mW.

Then, on-chip temperature compensation (TC) for optical transmitter (Tx) modules is reported. The TC block is integrated i...