50Gb/s Hybrid Integrated Si-Photonic Optical Link in 16nm FinFET

We present an EAM based single-mode optical link. The TX uses over-peaking to improve modulation efficiency and relax TIA's noise requirement. The RX uses a 3-stage TIA with T-coils to improve bandwidth. The link achieves$BER < 10^{-12}$while consuming 4.31pJ/bit at 50Gb/s with 2dB link margin.