Energy-Efficient Channel Alignment of DWDM Silicon Photonic Transceivers

Yuyang Wang1,a, M. Ashkan Seyedi2, Rui Wu1, Jared Hulme2, Marco Fiorentino2, Raymond G. Beausoleil2 and Kwang-Ting Cheng3
1University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
2Hewlett Packard Labs, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Palo Alto, CA, USA
3School of Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
awyy@ece.ucsb.edu

ABSTRACT


The comb laser‐driven microring‐based dense wavelength division multiplexing silicon photonics is a promising candidate for next‐generation optical interconnects. However, existing solutions for exploring the power‐performance trade‐off of such systems have been restricted to a limited design space, resulting from the unnecessary constraints of using an identical spacing for laser comb lines and microring channels, and of utilizing consecutive laser comb lines for data transmission. We propose an energy‐efficient channel alignment scheme that aligns the microring channels to a subset of laser comb lines that are non‐uniformly distributed in the free spectrum range of the microrings. Based on a well‐established process variation model, our simulations show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the microring tuning power in the presence of denser comb lines. The power saved from microring tuning can improve the overall system energy efficiency despite some power wasted in unused laser comb lines. We further conducted a case study for design space exploration using the proposed channel alignment scheme, seeking the most energy‐efficient configuration in order to achieve a target aggregated data rate.



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