High-speed silicon photonics ring-resonator modulators for optical-amplification-free links

Unprecedented demand for energy-efficient optical interconnects in AI clusters requires scalable and small footprint solutions. Silicon photonics platform has emerged as scalable cost-effective solution for short-reach optical interconnects. In this paper, we report record optical-amplification free performance using our designed silicon photonics C + L band and O band ring-resonator modulators suitable for high energy-efficiency optical interconnects. We demonstrate optical-amplification-free transmission of up to 245 Gbps OOK, 280 Gbps PAM4 and 265 Gbps PAM6 using C + L band RRM and up to 206 Gbps OOK and 224 Gbps PAM4 using O band RRM. The achieved speeds are shown as gross bitrate. This paves way for energy-efficient dense optical interconnects with great manufacturing scalability.