Johan Bauwelinck
Ghent University, Belgium
Title: High-speed transceiver electronics for next-generation optical networks
Biography
Biography: Johan Bauwelinck
Abstract
High-speed electronic integrated circuits are essential to the development of new fiber-optic communication systems. Exponentially increasing data consumption is expanding the applications of optical communication and driving the development of faster and more efficient transceivers. Fiber-optic communication networks operate on very different scales from very short interconnects in datacenters to very long links between cities, countries or continents. Optical fibers are also increasingly used for access networks (e.g. fiber-to-the-home) and for mobile fronthauling and backhauling. Advances in opto-electronic devices, high-volume manufacturing and packaging technologies are driving numerous developments in these diverse applications. Because of the increasing speeds, close integration and co- design of photonic and electronic devices have become a necessity to realize high-performance sub-systems, while such co-design brings new opportunities as well on the sub-system architecture level to break traditional performance-cost trade-offs. There is no single best solution among electrical and optical technologies due to the different technological constraints in terms of distance, footprint, power consumption, cost, etc. Research is approaching this challenge from different angles, with technological improvements on photonic and electronic devices and/or by applying more complex modulation and signal processing. While each application operates on a very different scale (fiber length, number of users) with very different requirements (capacity, signal format, cost, power, etc.), they share one thing, their need for application-specific high-speed electronic transceiver circuits such as driver amplifiers, transimpedance amplifiers, equalizers and clock-and- data recovery circuits. This presentation will illustrate a few recent and ongoing developments from various H2020 projects.
Figure 1: 56Gb/s PAM-4 single-mode VCSEL driver array
Figure 2: 64Gb/s PAM-4 transimpedance amplifier array
Recent Publications
- M Vanhoecke et. al. (2017) Segmented optical transmitter comprising a CMOS driver array and an InP IQMZM for advanced modulation formats. J. Lightw. Technol. 35(4):862- 867.
- J Verbist et. al. (2016) A 40-GBd QPSK/16-QAM integrated silicon coherent receiver. IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 28(19):2070-2073.
- B. Moeneclaey et. al. (2017) 40-Gb/s TDM-PON downstream link with Low-Cost EML transmitter and APD-Based electrical duobinary receiver. J. Lightw. Technol. 35(4):1083-1089.