Design and modeling of high speed P-i-N photodetector for 50 GB/S optical fiber links

Abstract

High speed optical interconnect holds the key to the future Internet revolution; optical fibers have replaced traditional copper wires over long distances within data centers and high performance computing (HPC) due to their speed and reliability. With the increasing demand for high speed data transmission in data center and cloud computing applications, the development of optical transceivers has become indispensable. To complement high speed transmitters in optical links, high speed receiver devices, known as photodetectors, need to be designed properly so as not to present a bottleneck in the performance of optical links. With the aid of microwave modeling, we can characterize the performance of the photodetector and therefore improve the devices. This work will present the quantitative design and analysis of the P-i-N photodetector which is capable of operating at 50 Gb/s data rate for energy efficient transmission.