Energy Efficient and High Bandwidth Quantum Dot Comb Laser Based Silicon Microring Transmitter for Optical Interconnects

Explosive development of artificial intelligence has recently driven strong demand of ultra-large bandwidth interconnects. Optical I/O is considered as a promising approach of implementing ultra-short link data transmission among computing chips. Here, we demonstrated an O-band 8 × 100 Gb/s transmitter based on single quantum dot mode-locked comb laser and arrayed 8-λ microring modulators. The semiconductor laser currently offers the lowest power consumption for multi-wavelength operation and the most compact footprint. All 8 comb channels are modulated at 100 Gbps, with total energy efficiency of the transmitter at 1.66 pJ/bit (laser source included).