67 GHz light-trapping-structure germanium photodetector supporting 240 Gb/s PAM-4 transmission

Abstract

A light-trapping-structure vertical Ge photodetector (PD) is demonstrated. In the scheme, a 3 μm radius Ge mesa is fabricated to constrain the optical signal in the circular absorption area. Benefiting from the light-trapping structure, the trade-off between bandwidth and responsivity can be relaxed, and high opto-electrical bandwidth and high responsivity are achieved simultaneously. The measured 3 dB bandwidth of the proposed PD is around 67 GHz, and the responsivity is around 1.05 A/W at wavelengths between 1520 and 1560 nm. At 1580 nm, the responsivity is still over 0.78 A/W. A low dark current of 6.4 nA is also achieved at <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" id="m1"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo form="prefix">−</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> <mml:mtext> </mml:mtext> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">V</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> bias voltage. Based on this PD, a clear eye diagram of 100 GBaud four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) is obtained. With the aid of digital signal processing, 240 Gb/s PAM-4 signal back-to-back transmission is achieved with a bit error ratio of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" id="m2"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>1.6</mml:mn> <mml:mo>×</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> . After 1 km and 2 km fiber transmission, the highest bit rates are 230 and 220 Gb/s, respectively.