A schematic view of the microring resonator-based silicon photonic link in the Synopsys OptSim environment showing the link architecture for 4 channels and intermediate measurements for the photonic-electronic co-simulation. A frequency comb wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) source is coupled into the transmitter photonic integrated circuit (PIC), which then encodes electronic data signals onto each wavelength and sends them in parallel over fiber to the receiver PIC. At the receiver, wavelength-selective microring filters drop each wavelength channel from the bus onto photodetectors, which convert the optical signals back into the electrical domain. Silicon photonic interconnects have the potential to greatly increase the communication bandwidth and lower the energy consumption of high performance computing and data center systems, which currently account for ~ 2% of the world's electricity consumption and are rapidly expanding to accommodate the rise of big data applications such as machine learning and cloud computing.
