Design of energy-efficient Tb/s per carrier communication ICs

The goal is to explore and demonstrate energy efficient (0.5-5 pJ/bit) silicon THz radio and silicon photonic transceivers with direct modulation based on 100+GHz sampling mutibit digital-to-analog converters and analog-to-dgital converters. Each bit lane will operate at baseband data rates of at least 100 Gb/s and it will modulate either optical (100 THz) or THz (240-480 GHz) carriers. Such energy-efficient Tb systems are needed for the scaling of data centers and cloud computing beyong the next two generations.

Sorin Voinigescu

March 2012