Interface of Electrical Data-Bus to Multimode Optical Data-Bus Using Racetrack Microring Resonators

Optical interconnect has the advantages of high-bandwidth, low power consumption, and low latency so it is very suitable for the application of optical data-bus. In this letter, we demonstrate a scalable interface of electrical data-bus to multimode on-chip optical data-bus. We use power splitters and cascaded asymmetric racetrack microring resonators manipulated with carrier-depletion modulation to convert multi-channel electrical signals to the orthogonal mode channels of the multimode waveguide. As a proof of concept, we fabricated a chip with four mode channels. With 50 Gbps data rate for each channel, we derived an aggregate data rate of 200 Gbps.