SF241-0021 High Speed Optical Interconnects for Efficient Intra-Satellite Data Transfer in the Space Environment

In this project, we are developing an advanced co-packaged optics (CPO) solution meeting future space application requirement. Our solutions leverage rad-hard resilient CMOS (FDSOI) as well as emerging Silicon Photonics (SiPho) technologies using trusted commercial foundries (GlobalFoundries (GF) and AIM Photonics) located in USA. Our chiplet-style solution can leverage emerging advanced heterogenous packaging to bring optical I/O for network switches, processors, FPGAs, and even baseband RF frontends. We are uniquely positioned to develop this technology due our extensive CMOS design expertise and design portfolio for space and military applications. We have developed a unique CMOS PDK that allows us to simulate radiation effects (TID and single event) on electronics, enabling us to mitigate the adverse effects and compensate for them in CMOS. We have also developed Verilog-A models of SiPho devices to co-simulate radiation effects on overall optical link performance. In this project, we leverage wavelength division multiplying (WDM) and use compact modulators such as micro-ring modulators (MRM) to achieve program targets. Our solution is fully compatible with latest trends in datacenter optical connectivity technologies. This is crucial to make a seamless commercialization path for future of our approaches and solution for space applications. Our Phase-1 studies and simulations shows we can meet program requirements while improving the size/weight, number of fibers and energy-efficiencies by at least an order of magnitude compared with SoA (in this case custom module from Smiths Interconnects). We believe our approach can tolerate a record TID radiation level of up to 1Mrad, provide the lowest energy interconnects of 5pJ/b, and it can be seamlessly extended to +1Tb/s per fiber in future by using larger number of wavelengths.