A light-trapping-structure vertical Ge photodetector (PD) is demonstrated. In the scheme, a 3 μm radius Ge mesa is fabricated to constrain the optical signal in the circular absorption area. Benefiting from the light-trapping structure, the trade-off between bandwidth and responsivity can be relaxed, and high opto-electrical bandwidth and high responsivity are achieved simultaneously. The measured 3 dB bandwidth of the proposed PD is around 67 GHz, and the responsivity is around 1.05 A/W at wavelengths between 1520 and 1560 nm. At 1580 nm, the responsivity is still over 0.78 A/W. A low dark current of 6.4 nA is also achieved at -2V bias voltage. Based on this PD, a clear eye diagram of 100 GBaud four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) is obtained. With the aid of digital signal processing, 240 Gb/s PAM-4 signal back-to-back transmission is achieved with a bit error ratio of 1.6×10-2. After 1 km and 2 km fiber transmission, the highest bit rates are 230 and 220 Gb/s, respectively.

An ultrafast microring modulator (MRM) is fabricated and presented with Vπ·L of 0.825V·cm. A 240 Gb/s PAM-8 signal transmission over 2 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) is experimentally demonstrated. PN junction doping concentration is optimized, and the overall performance of the MRM is improved. Optical peaking is introduced to further extend the EO bandwidth from 52 to 110 GHz by detuning the input wavelength. A titanium nitride heater with 0.1 nm/mW tuning efficiency is implemented above the MRM to adjust the resonant wavelength. High bit rate modulations based on the high-performance and compact MRM are carried out. By adopting off-line signal processing in the transmitter and receiver side, 120 Gb/s NRZ, 220 Gb/s PAM-4, and 240 Gb/s PAM-8 are measured with the back-to-back bit error ratio (BER) of 5.5×10-4, 1.5×10-2, and 1.4×10-2, respectively. A BER with different received optical power and 2 km SSMF transmission is also investigated. The BER for 220 Gb/s PAM-4 and 240 Gb/s PAM-8 after 2 km SSMF transmission is calculated to be 1.7×10-2 and 1.5×10-2, which meet with the threshold of soft-decision forward-error correction, respectively.

Up to now, the light coupling schemes of germanium-on-silicon photodetectors (Ge-on-Si PDs) could be divided into three main categories: (1) vertical (or normal-incidence) illumination, which can be from the top or back of the wafer/chip, and waveguide-integrated coupling including (2) butt coupling and (3) evanescent coupling. In evanescent coupling the input waveguide can be positioned on top, at the bottom, or lateral to the absorber. Here, to the best of our knowledge, we propose the first concept of Ge-on-Si PD with double lateral silicon nitride (Si3N4) waveguides, which can serve as a novel waveguide-integrated coupling configuration: double lateral coupling. The Ge-on-Si PD with double lateral Si3N4 waveguides features uniform optical field distribution in the Ge region, which is very beneficial to improving the operation speed for high input power. The proposed Ge-on-Si PD is comprehensively characterized by static and dynamic measurements. The typical internal responsivity is evaluated to be 0.52 A/W at an input power of 25 mW. The equivalent circuit model and theoretical 3 dB opto-electrical (OE) bandwidth investigation of Ge-on-Si PD with lateral coupling are implemented. Based on the small-signal (S21) radio-frequency measurements, under 4 mA photocurrent, a 60 GHz bandwidth operating at -3V bias voltage is demonstrated. When the photocurrent is up to 12 mA, the 3 dB OE bandwidth still has 36 GHz. With 1 mA photocurrent, the 70, 80, 90, and 100 Gbit/s non-return-to-zero (NRZ) and 100, 120, 140, and 150 Gbit/s four-level pulse amplitude modulation clear openings of eye diagrams are experimentally obtained without utilizing any offline digital signal processing at the receiver side. In order to verify the high-power handling performance in high-speed data transmission, we investigate the eye diagram variations with the increase of photocurrents. The clear open electrical eye diagrams of 60 Gbit/s NRZ under 20 mA photocurrent are also obtained. Overall, the proposed lateral Si3N4 waveguide structure is flexibly extendable to a light coupling configuration of PDs, which makes it very attractive for developing high-performance silicon photonic integrated circuits in the future.

We demonstrate the optical transmission of an 800 Gbit/s (4×200Gbit/s) pulse amplitude modulation-4 (PAM-4) signal and a 480 Gbit/s (4×120Gbit/s) on–off-keying (OOK) signal by using a high-bandwidth (BW) silicon photonic (SiP) transmitter with the aid of digital signal processing (DSP). In this transmitter, a four-channel SiP modulator chip is co-packaged with a four-channel driver chip, with a measured 3 dB BW of 40 GHz. DSP is applied in both the transmitter and receiver sides for pre-/post-compensation and bit error rate (BER) calculation. Back-to-back (B2B) BERs of the PAM-4 signal and OOK signal are first measured for each channel of the transmitter with respect to a variety of data rates. Similar BER performance of four channels shows good uniformity of the transmitter between different channels. The BER penalty of the PAM-4 and OOK signals for 500 m and 1 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission is then experimentally tested by using one channel of the transmitter. For a 200 Gbit/s PAM-4 signal, the BER is below the hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold for B2B and below the soft-decision FEC (SD-FEC) threshold after 1 km transmission. For a 120 Gbit/s OOK signal, the BER is below SD-FEC threshold for B2B. After 500 m and 1 km transmission, the data rate of the OOK signal shrinks to 119 Gbit/s and 118 Gbit/s with the SD-FEC threshold, respectively. Finally, the 800 Gbit/s PAM-4 signal with 1 km transmission is achieved with the BER of all four channels below the SD-FEC threshold.