Compact multi-port multi-wavelength laser source with Tbps transmission for optical I/O technology

In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel compact multi-port multi-wavelength laser source (MP-MWL) for the optical I/O technology. The multi-wavelength DFB laser array is used for realizing the simultaneous emission of multiple wavelengths. The reconstruction equivalent chirp technique is used to design and fabricate the π-phase shifted DFB laser array to achieve precise wavelength spacing. The number of wavelengths is enlarged through the monolithically integrated wavelength routing architecture (WRA), and 64 optical carriers are obtained with 8 wavelengths in 8 output ports. The proposed MP-MWL has high mode stability and high uniform wavelength spacing. The side mode suppression ratio (SMSR) of each wavelength is more than 40 dB and the wavelength spacing is 100 GHz under 25 °C working environment. A semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is monolithically integrated into each output port to amplify the output power. The output power of each port exceeds 15 mW when the current injected into the SOA is 150 mA. Besides, the relative intensity noise (RIN) of all wavelengths is below -130 dB/Hz, and clear 25 Gb/s NRZ eye grams are obtained for the 64 optical carriers with the external lithium-niobate Mach-Zehnder modulator, with a total transmission rate of 1.6 Tbps. The superior performance of the proposed MP-MWL enables it to be a promising approach for the Tbps optical I/O links and high-density chip interconnection system.