Recent progress in 40 Gb/s IC/OEIC design and manufacturing

The volume of traffic on the Internet doubles approximately every year. This puts increasing demand on the data handling capacity of the optical network. Currently the core of this network operates at data rates up to about 10 Gb/s (OC-192). The next generation, currently in development, will operate at data-rates in the neighborhood of 40 Gb/s (OC-768). This new speed regime poses particularly challenging technology and design issues. The semiconductor technology choices are practically limited to a few including GaAs, Si-Ge, and InP, the latter showing the greatest promise in terms of performance margin. Other technical issues, which require innovative new approaches, include packaging and testing. We will discuss the technology and design challenges in this presentation.