Achieving High Reliability in Silicon Photonics Optical Transceivers for Harsh Environments Over 100 °C in Excess of Ten-Year Operation

In this article, we report on the design and performance of a silicon photonics microtransceiver, which is designed to operate in harsh environments including high-temperature environments above <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$105~^{\circ }$ </tex-math></inline-formula>C and space environments. In addition, we demonstrated that the microtransceiver modules have been applied to immersion cooling, which must be considered another harsh environmental condition due to its novelty for optical active components. The four-channel “IOCore (Registered trademark)” microtransceiver incorporates a 1310-nm quantum dot (QD) laser system and operates at a symbol rate of 32 GBd and higher. The <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5\times 5$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm microtransceiver chip benefits from a multimode coupling interface for low-cost assembly and robust connectivity at high temperatures.