Integrated Kerr frequency comb-driven silicon photonic transmitter

Abstract

The exponential growth of computing needs for artificial intelligence and machine learning has had a dramatic impact on data centre energy consumption, which has risen to environmentally significant levels. Using light to send information between compute nodes can dramatically decrease this energy consumption while simultaneously increasing bandwidth. Through wavelength-division multiplexing with chip-based microresonator Kerr frequency combs, independent information channels can be encoded onto many distinct colours of light in the same optical fibre for massively parallel data transmission with low energy. While previous demonstrations have relied on benchtop equipment for filtering and modulating Kerr comb wavelength channels, data centre interconnects require a compact on-chip form factor for these operations. Here, we demonstrate the first integrated silicon photonic transmitter using a Kerr comb source. The demonstrated architecture is scalable to hundreds of wavelength channels, enabling a fundamentally new class of massively parallel terabit-scale optical interconnects for future green hyperscale data centres.

References in corpus (16)

• Microresonator solitons for massively parallel coherent optical communications
• Fully integrated ultra-low power Kerr comb generation
• Mode interaction aided excitation of dark solitons in microresonators constructed of normal dispersion waveguides
• Coherent terabit communications with microresonator Kerr frequency combs
• Integrated turnkey soliton microcombs operated at CMOS frequencies
• Optical data transmission at 44Tb/s and 10 bits/s/Hz over the C-band with standard fibre and a single micro-comb source
• A one femtojoule athermal silicon modulator
• High-channel-count 20 GHz passively mode locked quantum dot laser directly grown on Si with 4.1 Tbit/s transmission capacity
• Turn-key, high-efficiency Kerr comb source
• Synchronization of coupled optical microresonators
• Tunable frequency combs based on dual microring resonators
• Post-Fabrication Trimming of Silicon Photonic Ring Resonators at Wafer-Scale
• Generation of platicons and frequency combs in optical microresonators with normal GVD by modulated pump
• Synchronization of non-solitonic Kerr combs
• Silicon Photonics WDM Transceiver with SOA and Semiconductor Mode-Locked Laser
• Inverse-designed multi-dimensional silicon photonic transmitters