100 Gbps Radiation Tolerant Optical Transceiver

High-radiation environments such as the Large Hadron Collider, (LHC) need components which are rad hard to a level of hundreds of Mrad. In addition, because the LHC will receive a high luminosity (HL) upgrade, the data produced will need to be transmitted at the rate of 10’s to 100’s of Tbps. In addition, the solution needs to be low mass. This will be accomplished using an array-able rad hard transmitter which does not require TE cooling and which is more efficient per bit than VCSEL solutions, and runs at 100 Gbps/channel. This is accomplished with rad hard driver circuitry, combined with a laser-EAM chip which is designed to be rad hard, high speed and temperature insensitive. Phase 1 will demonstrate the rad-hard high-speed laser-EAM chip at 100 Gbps irradiated at various doses. Phase 1 will also demonstrate the rad hardness of the the driver circuitry in a nanometer CMOS process (such as 28nm), which include the complete design of the circuit for a 40-56 Gbps driver using PAM4. Phase II will integrate an array of these laser-EAMs flip chipped onto an array of drivers and tested at speed, over temperature and with various radiation doses. Because of the current lack of availability of suitable processes the NRZ 100 Gbps driver circuit will likely wait until Phase III. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: Commercial applications for the technologies developed by this project are in every data center and every computer so that it could potentially become ubiquitous. Supercomputers are the most likely large scale initial application. Super computers suffer from several bottlenecks and technological limitations which these devices address. Latency is addressed by eventually driving this transmitter at 100 Gbps NRZ. Power consumption is addressed by using 40 % less power per bit compared to a VCSEL solution. Data rate is addressed by running at 100 Gbps or greater, and using arrays. The higher data rate with arrays addresses the fiber form factor. The fiber form factor can be further easily addressed using CWDM because this device can be designed to work at a variety of wavelengths so that up to 5 different wavelengths can share a single fiber ribbon. In substantial volume the costs can be low enough to be useful across all the proposed platforms.