An Energy Efficient 1 Gb/s On-Chip Opto-electronic Transceiver Link using Monolithically-Integrated CMOS plus III-V LEDs

As the data rate increases, the multicore and ultrafast processors require high speed interconnects that enable individual processors to allow fast access to memory, other cores and I/O devices. Optical interconnects are seen as potential solution to the limitations faced by electrical interconnects, viz. ringing, signal latency, crosstalk and frequency dependent attenuation. Using LASERS as optical source is highly unsuitable for on-chip networks due to the power-hungry requirements of the light source, even when the optical link is sparsely used. To address the growing demand for power-efficient on-chip communication, we propose a III-V and Si monolithic integrated opto-electronic transceiver which is directly compatible with CMOS process. The design uses mu-LEDs to replace LASER as the light source. Post layout results show that the design works successfully at a datarate of 1 Gb/s. The Energy/bit measured is around 450fJ/bit when operating at 1 Gb/s. The core area is 100umx40um for the integrated design.