A 3D photonic-electronic integrated transponder aggregator with 48×16 heater control cells

An electronic integrated circuit (EIC) and a silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) are three-dimensional (3D)- integrated. The EIC using the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) part of STMicroelectronics’ BCD8sp 0.16μm technology controls all 768 switches in the PIC individually and monitors them with 84 transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs). A scalable analog-digital approach with a cell size of 100×100μm² for thermal control of optical ring resonator switch matrices is introduced. An electrical power consumption of 220mW for all electronic control circuits of the optical swi tch matrix is resulting in 5.5% of the power needed by a constant-voltage control approach.