Coherent Silicon Photonic Links Slides

Abstract: With datacenters mushrooming around each other to provide the necessary bandwidth for our computing and communication needs, the need to interconnect them with optical fibers at low cost and high energy efficiency has significantly increased. Coherent silicon photonic links bear the promise to satisfy that demand at an unprecedented scale, integration, and (low) cost. In this talk, I will briefly introduce coherent silicon photonics, draw parallels to wireless radio transceivers, describe the photonics and electronics details of 16-QAM coherent links operating at 0.5Tb/s, and comment on some of the subsequent research opportunities in bringing coherent links inside the datacenters.