A silicon photonic wavelength division multiplex system for high-speed data transmission in detector instrumentation

We propose a new silicon photonics-based optical transmission system utilizing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) . This technology has the possibility of reading out all raw data from a detector even without massive local data reduction. The transmitter in the detector volume consists of multiple integrated Mach-Zehnder modulators monolithically integrated with wavelength (de-)multiplexers. The first demonstrator currently under development aims for a data rate of 160 Gbit/s per fiber, scalable to 5 Tbit/s and beyond. We report on our recently developed Echelle grating WDM multiplexers with up to 45 channels on an area of 0.5 mm² and electro-optic modulators providing a bandwidth of 18 GHz