Demonstration of Optical Re-Distribution on Silicon Photonics Die Using Polymer Waveguide and Micro Mirrors

An optical re-distribution based on micro-mirrors and polymer waveguide was demonstrated on a silicon photonics die for advanced co-packaged optics. Low wavelength dependent characteristics was obtained and 28GBaud NRZ signal was also successfully transmitted with negligible signal distortions.

Introduction

In high performance computer systems and large-scale data centers, data movement becomes a critical problem^[1]. Increasing data rates of conventional electrical links causes low latency tolerance, high power consumption, and poor signal integrity, especially for long distance interconnects. To extremely reduce the length of high-data-rate electrical links, co-packaging technologies of optics chips (e.g. silicon (Si) photonics) and high-performance large-scale integration (LSI) chips are attracted much attention. For example, Rockley Photonics showed a switch application specific integration circuits (ASICs) where Si photonics chips were co-packaged at OFC 2018, and dozen ribbon optical fiber cables were connected to it^[2]. Such massively parallel optical input/outputs (I/Os) will be necessary for high performance LSIs like upcoming high-capacity switch ASICs over 51.2 Tbps.