Transmitter made up of a Silicon Photonic IC and its Flip-Chipped CMOS IC DriverTargeting implementation in FDMA-PON

We report on the design, fabrication and characterization of a reflective transmitter targeting implementation in Passive Optical Networks (PON) with Frequency Division Multiplexed Access (FDMA). It is made up of a Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit (Si-PIC) comprising a Reflective Mach Zehnder Modulator (R-MZM) and its flip chipped CMOS Electronic Integrated Circuit (EIC) driver, the two ICs being interconnected by means of high density and low parasitic copper micro pillars. Several transmissions, in an FDMA PON context, are successfully demonstrated using 500MBaud QPSK and 16-QAM modulated subcarriers, achieving Bit Error Rate (BER) below 2.10-3. For QPSK-modulated subcarriers (respectively 16-QAM), the available access frequency bandwidth is measured to be [1-7GHz] (respectively [2-4GHz]) with an available loss budget of 9dB (respectively 5dB). Improvements of the Si-PIC are further identified to achieve compliancy with 31dB ODN loss.