Design and evaluation of 4 channel full-duplex transceiver modules for optical communication applications

The phenomenal increase in data transmission rate and the explosive rise in the speed of electronic communication systems in the recent years are mainly influenced by the growth of the Internet. The demand for bandwidth has exceeded the capacity limit of conventional copper cable for even very short reach interconnect distances. Although a potential replacement for the copper cabling is commercially available with multichannel parallel optical interconnect technology, the high module cost is a concern for large scale deployment. The paper presents the electrical hardware interface design, prototype fabrication and performance evaluation of a cost effective, high bit rate multi-channel bidirectional transceiver module in this publication. The compact transceiver module allows 10 Gb/s on a single fiber in transmit or receive mode, simultaneously achieving an overall throughput of 20 Gb/s. The transmitting and receiving electronics was designed using a general purpose single-ended MMIC amplifier configured as the laser diode driver in the transmitter and trans-impedance amplifier and limiting amplifier in the receiver blocks of the multichannel receiver, thereby reducing the inventory cost. The transceiver prototypes have been fabricated and the module performances are demonstrated to meet up the required data throughput capability.