120 Gb/s VCSEL-Based Parallel Optical Interconnect and Custom 120 Gb/s Testing Station

Copyright © (2004) by IEEE. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distrubuted for profit. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

A 120Gb/s optical link (12 channels at 10 Gb/s/ch, both a transmitter and an receiver) has been demonstrated. The link operated at a BER of less than 10-12 with all channels operating and with a total fiber length of 316 m which comprises 300m of next generation (OM-3) multimode fiber (MMF) plus 16m of standard grade MMF. This is the first time that a parallel link with this bandwidth at this per channel rate has ever been demonstrated. For the transmitter, a SiGe laser driver was combined with a GaAs VCSEL array. For the receiver, the signal from a GaAs photodiode array was amplified by a 12 channel SiGe receiver IC. Key to the demonstration were several custom testing tools, most notably a 12-channel pattern generator. The package is very similar to the commercial parallel modules that are available today, but the per-channel bit rate is three times higher than for the commercial modules. The new modules demonstrate the possibility of extending the parallel optical module technology that is available today into a distance*bandwidth regime that is unattainable for copper cables.

By: Daniel Kuchta, Young Kwark, Christian Schuster, Christian Baks, Chuck Haymes, Jeremy Schaub, Petar Pepeljugoski, Lei Shan, Richard John, Daniel Kucharski, Dennis Rogers, Mark Ritter, Jack Jewell, Luke Graham, Karl Schrödinger, Alexander Schild, Hans-Martin Rein

Published in: Journal of Lightwave Technology, volume 22, (no 9), pages 2200-12 in 2004

LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE:

This Research Report is available. This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). I have read and understand this notice and am a member of the scientific community outside or inside of IBM seeking a single copy only.

rc23067.pdf

Questions about this service can be mailed to reports@us.ibm.com .