Terabit-Per-Second Integrated Photonic Transceiver for Reduced Optical-Link Power (TIPTOP)

We propose to develop a high-bandwidth integrated photonic transceiver architecture that monolithically integrates a microresonator frequency comb with state-of-the-art CMOS photonics and electronics. Our approach enables the efficient generation of more than 32 coherent wavelength channels from a single C-band pump laser and is compatible with dense wavelength division multiplexing schemes. In this project, we integrate the comb generator with the CMOS chip via back-end-of-line processing that largely decouples the fabrication of the silicon photonics circuitry from the microresonator. The end result will be a working transceiver prototype compatible with data rates exceeding 1 Tbps and at a record energy-per-bit efficiency of 100 fJ/bit.