ISSCC 2024 Session 18 Overview: High-Performance Optical Transceivers

With the ever-growing demand for higher bandwidth in network and telecommunication infrastructure, coherent optical transceivers are pushing the speed limits in the already popular long-haul (LH) and ultra-long-haul (ULH) interface applications and expanding their usage to data center Ethernet switching and artificial intelligence (AI) applications.At the same time, co-packaged optics (CPO) modules allow tight integration of chips with optical links for ultra-wide bandwidth switches and high-performance computing (HPC).The papers in this session describe transmitter and receiver architectures that enable high-speed yet low-power operation.The first paper presents a 600Gb/s DP-QAM-64 coherent optical transceiver frontend.The second paper proposes a co-packaged and fiber-terminated VCSEL-based optical transmitter, which, with the aid of a complex-zero CTLE and low-power clocking scheme, achieves a data rate of 64Gb/s while maintaining low power consumption.The last two papers in this session describe an 8b 160GS/s optical transmitter and an 8b 200GS/s receiver in an order.The transmitter achieves a bandwidth of 57GHz with the help of a proposed DAC calibration technique, while the receiver employs various bandwidth extension techniques to simultaneously enable a bandwidth of 60GHz with low power consumption.