Semiconductor technologies for high speed optical networking

For high speed TDM optical links, high speed physical layer electronics provides critical interface between the local electronic data traffic and high speed optoelectronic devices. We examine the impact of several high speed compound semiconductor IC technologies such as SiGe, GaAs, and InP, on the performance of optoelectronic transceivers at data rate of 40 Gbps and 100+ Gbps regime. In this paper, we utilize a 40 Gbps optoelectronics transceiver as an example to illustrate the advantages and limitations of these compound semiconductor IC technologies.