PHOTON SCIENCES, INCORPORATED — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: S5

Description

Exascale computing for Large-Scale Numerical Simulation requires a new technology for optical communication. VCSEL based transmitters run out of bandwidth at 56 Gbps PAM4, and the latency of PAM4 is incompatible with exascale computing. Other available technologies arenbsp;expensive, have high power consumption, are far from proven or they require PAM4 andnbsp;temperature control. Our proposed concept integrates an Electro-Absorption Modulator (EAM) with anbsp; laser capable of gt;gt; 100 Gbps/channel NRZ which can be arrayed to gt; 1.2 Tbps for a 12 element array and using Course Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM) with 6 wavelengths can reach gt; 7 Tbps. Using NRZ instead of a more complex format (e.g. PAM4)nbsp;reduces latency dramatically. The proposed device can operate over a wide temperature range, at least 20C to 100C and potentially over the full military range (-55C to 125C) without temperature control. The characteristic which distinguish our devicenbsp;from traditional Laser-EAM solutions is the extremely short, high absorption, low capacitance EAM which allows significantly higher data rates,nbsp;lower power andnbsp;operationnbsp;over large temperature ranges so TE coolers are not needed. The SE Laser-EAM has a 50% (0.3 pJ/bit vs 0.6 pJ/bit) reduction in power per bit compared to VCSEL solutions. The proposed low cost device can be manufactured by the billions. The SE Laser-EAM array can be flip-chip mounted onto silicon. This unique device has ten times the reach of VCSELs, more than sufficient for any data center or exascale computer. nbsp;Further, our proposed device has the inherent capability for 300 Gbps NRZ (600 Gbps PAM4) when packaging and IC driver technologies are available.nbsp;nbsp; times;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;