Design and performance evaluation of multi-Gb/s silicon photonics transmitters for high energy physics

Optical links are rapidly becoming pervasive in the readout chains of particle physics detector systems. Silicon photonics (SiPh) stands as an attractive candidate to sustain the radiation levels foreseen in the next-generation experiments, while guaranteeing, at the same time, multi-Gb/s and energy-efficient data transmission. Integrated electronic drivers are needed to enable SiPh modulators' deployment in compact on-detector front-end modules. A current-mode logic-based driver harnessing a pseudo-differential output stage is proposed in this work to drive different types of SiPh devices by means of the same circuit topology. The proposed driver, realized in a 65 nm bulk technology and already tested to behave properly up to an 8MGy total ionizing dose, is hybridly integrated in this work with a lumped-element Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) and a ring modulator (RM), both fabricated in a 130 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process. Bit-error-rate (BER) performances confirm the applicability of the selected architecture to either differential and single-ended loads. A 5 Gb/s data rate, in line with the current high energy physics requirements, is achieved in the RM case, while a packaging-related performance degradation is captured in the MZM-based system, confirming the importance of interconnection modeling.