2244 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 31, NO.

13, JULY 1, 2013

An Integrated 40 Gbit/s Optical Costas Receiver

Mingzhi Lu, Hyun-chul Park, Eli Bloch, Abirami Sivananthan, John S. Parker, Zach Griffith,
Leif A. Johansson, Member, IEEE, Mark J. W. Rodwell, Fellow, IEEE, and Larry A. Coldren, Fellow, IEEE

Abstract—In this paper, a highly-integrated widely-tunable op- phase-locked loops (OPLLs) [7]–[12]. On the other hand, intra-
tical homodyne receiver is reported with 40 Gbaud/s data rate. dyne detection is depended on digital signal processor (DSP) to
By using photonic and electronic integration, the receiver is real- correct the frequency and phase difference between the trans-
ized within a size of 10 10 , and the system is very robust
mitting laser and the LO [5].
and resistive to environmental changes. An integrated photonic co-
herent receiver circuit is demonstrated with 35 GHz photodetector Research on the coherent receiver started in the early 1980s,
bandwidth, and the integrated local oscillator (LO) laser covers a and most of the early efforts focused on homodyne technolo-
40 nm range. The electronic IC (EIC) has a working frequency up gies. Homodyne receivers have been well studied both theoret-
to 50 GHz. The feedback loop is carefully analyzed and designed, ically and experimentally [7]–[9], [12]–[15]. The main driving
and the experimental results show loop bandwidth, force of the homodyne receiver research was its highest sensi-
which matches the design. The hold-in range is measured to be tivity – (BER) can be achieved with only 9
. The phase noise of the transmitting laser has been
cloned to the LO laser quite well, and both the linewidth measure- photons per bit. However, one of the biggest problems that re-
ment and phase noise measurement show no observable cross talk searchers were facing was the insufficient phase locking band-
between binary phase shift keying (BPSK) data and the optical width relative to the LO laser linewidth. In other words, a very
phase-locked loop (OPLL). Error free ( ) narrow linewidth laser was required to achieve a stable phase
is achieved up to 35 Gbit/s. The system consumes 3 Watts of power. locking with respect to the limited loop bandwidth at that time.
Index Terms—Coherent receiver, Costas loop, homodyne detec- The limited speed of photodetectors and electronics components
tion, optical phase-locked loops, optical receivers. also limited the data rate, which gave rise to an even higher re-
quirement on LO laser linewidth [9]. Therefore, external cavity
lasers were normally used, which made the system bulky and
I. INTRODUCTION expensive. As for an OPLL with absolute stability, the loop nat-
ural frequency and the loop delay should satisfy a relation

R ECENTLY, a resurgence of effort is being devoted to the

research of coherent optic fiber communications, because
of the advantages of higher sensitivity, better noise tolerance,
of [16], which means that in order to achieve
loop bandwidth, loop delay is required.
By using external cavity laser, bulk optics and discrete com-
and, more importantly, its compatibility with complex modu- ponent electronics, this was very difficult at that time [17]. In
lation format, such as QPSK, 16 QAM, which leads to higher order to increase the loop bandwidth and therefore make the
spectrum efficiency [1]–[5]. loop more stable, photonic and electronic integration becomes
In order to demodulate phase shift keying (PSK) signals, co- necessary.
herent detection is needed. There are generally two ways to Later on, in the 1990s, with the invention of the Er-
achieve coherent detection for the optical phase shift keying bium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) and the wide application
(PSK) signals – homodyne detection and intradyne detection of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), the interest in
[4], [5]. The homodyne detection relies on the fixed phase rela- homodyne coherent receivers and PSK modulation dropped
tion between the transmitting laser and the local oscillator (LO) greatly. Many optical channels could be multiplexed into one
laser, which can be achieved by injection locking [6] or optical fiber and get amplified together. Long-haul communication, and
high-capacity network became more cost effective. At around
Manuscript received January 15, 2013; revised May 10, 2013; accepted May year 2008, the focus on coherent communication returned,
21, 2013. Date of publication May 29, 2013; date of current version June 14, with most of the efforts focused on the intradyne receiver.
2013. This work is supported by DARPA CIPhER (PICO) program. A portion The architecture of an intradyne coherent receiver normally
of this work was completed in the UCSB nanofabrication facility, part of NSF
funded NNIN network. The EIC fabrication was done at Teledyne Scientific. consists of an LO laser, an optical I/Q receiver, high speed
M. Lu, H.-C. Park, A. Sivananthan, J. S. Parker, L. A. Johansson, and analogue-to-digital converters (ADC), and a digital signal
M. J. W. Rodwell, are with the Department of Electrical and Computer processor (DSP). The I/Q receiver is normally built with a
Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA (e-mail:
mlu@ece.ucsb.edu; hcpark@ece.ucsb.edu; asivananthan@ece.ucsb.edu;
90-degree hybrid and four balanced photodectors. Complicated
JParker@ece.ucsb.edu; leif@ece.ucsb.edu; rodwell@ece.ucsb.edu). DSP algorithms are used to recover the data. For under-sea
E. Bloch is with Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion—Israel In- and long haul communications, the DSP algorithms normally
stitute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel (e-mail: bleli@tx.technion.ac.il). include, but may not limit to, chromatic dispersion (CD) com-
Z. Griffith is with Teledyne Scientific and Imaging Company, Thousand Oaks,
1049 Camino Dos Rios, CA, 91360 USA (e-mail: zgriffith@teledyne-si.com). pensation, clock recovery and timing adjusting, polarization
L. A. Coldren is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering de-multiplexing and polarization mode dispersion (PMD)
and the Department of Materials, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA compensation, frequency offset estimation, phase recovery, soft
93106 USA (e-mail: coldren@ece.ucsb.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
forward error correction (FEC), and decision [5].
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. The DSP-based intradyne receiver is powerful, but the high-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2013.2265075 speed sophisticated DSP not only increases the cost of coherent

0733-8724/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE

LU et al.: AN INTEGRATED 40 GBIT/S OPTICAL COSTAS RECEIVER 2245

receiver tremendously, but also suffers from high power con-

sumption. For shorter distance, where dispersion effects are not
severe, the application of DSP may be overkill, even though
only part of the algorithm steps are necessary for short distance.
In order to solve the high-cost and high power consumption
problems that intradyne receivers have, OPLL-based homodyne
receivers become an alternative. Regarding the technical prob-
lems that researchers had in the 1980s, most of them can be
solved by advanced integration technologies. Integration makes
the system smaller and more stable. The smaller size also leads
to a shorter loop delay for the OPLL, and therefore a much
wider loop bandwidth [16]–[21]. Wide loop bandwidth con-
tributes to the better system reliability, and better laser phase
noise suppression. Since there is no high-speed DSP involved,
the OPLL-based receiver can be much cheaper, and has signif-
icantly lower power consumption, compared to DSP-based in-
tradyne receivers.
The first highly integrated homodyne BPSK optical coherent
receiver was proposed, and a part of the measurement results
were demonstrated in our recent publications [11], [22]–[25].
In this paper, more detailed and comprehensive system design,
analysis, implementation, device fabrication, and measurement
results are described systematically. By photonic and electronic
integration, the whole receiver system is realized within a
Fig. 1. (a) The classic model of a Costas loop. (b) shows the detailed architec-
size of 10 10 . The loop bandwidth is measured to be ture of the Costas loop based OPLL. The PIC, EIC and loop filter are labeled in
, which is the highest to the best of our knowledge. both (a) and (b).
40 Gbit/s real-time BPSK data demodulation has been achieved.
The system also shows very good stability and reliability in
terms of temperature fluctuation. The power consumption is optical signal to electrical signal, they also act as low pass fil-
below 3 Watts, 0.5 Watts from the PIC and from ters. The mixer is realized by a delay line and an XOR gate,
the EIC, negligible ( ) from the loop filter. The which act together as a quadri-correlator phase/frequency de-
thermoelectric controller power consumption is no included. tector (PFD) [26]. The error signal from the PFD feeds back to
the laser tuning section through the loop filter.
By photonic and electronic integration, the system has been
II. COSTAS LOOP AND SYSTEM ANALYSIS
realized within a size of 10 10 , and the total loop delay
is as small as approximately 120 ps, where 40 ps is from the
A. Optical Costas Loop and its Components
photonic IC (PIC), 50 ps is from the electronic IC and 30 ps is
Among all homodyne coherent receiver architectures, Costas from the loop filter. On the photonic integrated circuit (PIC), a
loop is one of the most robust and commonly used. The elec- widely-tunable SG-DBR, an optical 90-degree hybrid, four pho-
trical Costas loop has been applied to many applications, such as todetectors and RF transmission lines are integrated monolithi-
GPS receivers and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing cally [22]. The Electronic IC (EIC) integrates four limiting am-
(OFDM). Sharing a similar architecture, optical Costas loops plifier (LIA) chains, a 10 ps delay line and an XOR gate. The
have also been well studied, such as decision-driven Costas input signals from the photodetectors on PIC are hard limited
loop [7]. The general architecture of the Costas loops are shown by the LIAs and therefore small optical power fluctuations will
in Fig. 1(a). By phase shifting one branch of the LO by 90 , not influence the system performance. The delay lines and the
and beating with the incoming signal, in-phase (I) and quadra- XOR gate together act as a phase and frequency detector, which
ture (Q) signals are generated and mixed at a mixer. The mixer can also been understood as a quadri-correlator [25], [26]. The
output feeds back to the LO, which can either be a voltage- frequency error response is linear, and the frequency detection
controlled oscillator (VCO) or a current-controlled oscillator sensitivity is 0.3 V/25 GHz, which is determined by the delay
(CCO). A loop filter is built in the loop to realize the desired loop time and EIC output maximum voltage. The XOR gate itself
characteristics, such as loop order, bandwidth, phase margin and also acts as a nonlinear phase detector, which can be analyzed
gain margin. by the equivalent linear gain for simplicity [11].
The optical Costas loop shares the same architecture [8]. A The third part of this Costas loop is an active loop filter (LF),
more detailed schematic of this optical Costas-loop-based co- where a novel two-path loop structure has been applied [11],
herent receiver is shown in Fig. 1(b). A widely-tunable sam- including an active slow path and a passive feed-forward fast
pled-grating DBR (SG-DBR) laser acts as the CCO, and the path. The feed-forward path includes no active components and
quadrature signals are generated in an optical 90-degree hy- provides the shortest delay possible for high frequency signals,
brid, where the 90 phase shift is introduced by an optical phase while the active path is composed of an operational amplifier
shifter, based on current injection. The I/Q signals are detected (Op-amp) based active filter, which gives more gain at lower
by four high speed photodetectors, which not only convert the frequency, and also makes sure the loop type (type II) does not
2246 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 31, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2013

Fig. 2. Basic PLL model.

get jeopardized [27]. The structure of this loop filter is also

shown in Fig. 1(b).

B. Loop Analysis
As for the loop analysis, both analytical and numerical
methods are used to characterize this Costas OPLL, as well as
the frequency-locked loop. Based on the loop model as shown
in Fig. 2, the open loop transfer function of this OPLL is
Fig. 3. Bode plot of the open loop response .
(1)
TABLE I
DESIGNED LOOP PARAMETERS
where is the phase detector sensitivity [V/rad], is
the loop filter response [A/V], is the CCO (LO laser)
sensitivity [rad/Hz/A], and represents the loop delay ef-
fect. As mentioned before, the phase detector sensitivity
is defined by the EIC gain and its output peak-to-peak voltage.
Since the signal is digitized in the LIAs, the phase detector be-
comes a bang-bang type. To simplify the analysis, linear equiv-
alent sensitivity is estimated and used in the loop analysis [11].
.
The CCO sensitivity is a function of frequency, and
can be expanded as
The loop parameters are listed in Table I. The simulated loop
(2) response is plotted in Fig. 3. As we can see, a 550 MHz open-
loop bandwidth has been achieved with 65 degree phase margin,
and 7.4 dB gain margin at 1.35 GHz, where the phase response
where is the laser phase section tuning responsivity in is .
unit of [Hz/A], is time constant from the minority carrier
lifetime, and the pole at zero frequency shows the frequency to III. LOOP COMPONENTS – PIC, EIC AND LOOP FILTER
phase conversion integral.
In order to obtain wider loop bandwidth, enough phase In order to design a robust synchronized homodyne coherent
margin and gain margin for loop stability, the loop filter re- receiver, one of the most important considerations is the loop
sponse need to be carefully designed. It is a two-path delay, and photonic and electronic integration becomes a perfect
loop filter design, and the expression of can be written solution. Integration not only decreases the size of the device,
as which leads to shorter loop delay, but also makes the coherent
system more stable and more resistive to environment changes
[28]. In this section, the design details about the PIC, the EIC
(3) and the loop filter will be explained respectively.

A. PIC Design and Fabrication

The first term on the right hand side of this equation represents
the Op-amp path, and the second term is the feed-forward path. As mentioned in the previous sections, the PIC includes an
is the parasitic parameter from the commercial Op-amp, and SG-DBR laser as the LO laser, an optical 90-degree hybrid to
is a RC time constant introduced to avoid 180 phase dif- mix the signal and the LO, four high-speed uni-traveling-carrier
ference when the responses of the two paths cross each other (UTC) photodetectors, and microstrip transmission lines. The
in frequency domain. is the gain constant of the first path of PIC is designed and fabricated based on semi-insulating (SI)
the loop filter. represents the laser phase section diode - InGaAsP/InP material. The architecture of the PIC is shown in
curve slope at the biased current (normally for this Fig. 4 as well as a microscope picture.
Costas receiver). is the extra delay introduced by Op-amp, The SG-DBR laser has a super-mode spacing of 7 nm, and
which can be around or even larger than several ns. is designed to cover 40 nm range. The phase tuning pad of
The total closed-loop response is the SG-DBR laser is used for the current feedback. Compared
to other tuning mechanisms, such as temperature tuning or
quantum stark effect, the current injection to a phase diode
(4)
with a wider bandgap can change the laser frequency fast
LU et al.: AN INTEGRATED 40 GBIT/S OPTICAL COSTAS RECEIVER 2247

Fig. 6. Schematics of the limiting ECL gates merged in a 50 transmission

lines environment.

Q signals, providing a relative delay, and mixing. Under zero

offset frequency, the IC output is proportional to the optical
Fig. 4. (a) shows the schematic of the PIC, including three sections: an
phase difference; in the presence of an optical frequency dif-
SG-DBR laser, a 90-degree hybrid and four uni-travelling carrier (UTC) ference, the IC output is proportional to this frequency differ-
photodetectors. (b) shows a microscope picture of the PIC. The different ence. The phase/frequency difference function is provided to
integrated components are labeled in both (a) and (b). enable PLL locking even with initial frequency offsets as large
as , although in real case the LO laser cavity mode
spacing sets a limit to the largest possible initial offset frequency
range.
Fig. 1(b) shows a block diagram of the full BPSK receiver.
The BPSK phase-frequency detector, denoted by the grey frame,
Fig. 5. Circuit schematic of the photodetector bias circuit on PIC.
receives its input from the optical interferometer. Assuming the
LO laser electrical field is and
the carrier laser electrical field is ,
and efficient, which leads to wider loop bandwidth and larger the optical interferometer provides the in-phase beat note
pull-in range. It also does not have the 180 phase transition at and the quadrature-phase beat note
low frequency (normally ) as single-electrode lasers , thus carrying an information on both phase
have [29]. and frequency offset magnitude and sign. The core of the phase-
The 90-degree coupler design is also shown in Fig. 1(b). It frequency detector (PFD) [25] consists of a delay line in the Q
uses a 1-by-2 multi-mode interference (MMI) couplers as the arm and a XOR gate, which is based on a Gilbert multiplier
first stage, which split the LO and the incoming signal into topology. To reduce the dependency on the LO and reference
two paths, respectively. The symmetry of 1-by-2 MMI cou- lasers photocurrent, The PFD is preceded by a high gain emitter
pler ensures equal splitting. Directional couplers are used as the coupled logic (ECL) limiting amplifier chain in order to convert
second stage couplers in the 90-degree hybrid, because a) direc- the signals into a rail to rail square wave – Fig. 6. All the ECL
tional couplers have the minimum reflection among all couplers, gates are biased by a tail current of 12 mA, hence providing a
which is very important to avoid injection locking since there is differential signal of 600 mV at a full swing mode, large enough
no isolator on PIC; b) it acts as a perfect 180 degree hybrid and to provide a full limiting ( ) as more is explained in [25].
the phase relationship is always correct, regardless of splitting In case of frequency detection, the Q signal is delayed by
ratio. and then mixed with I. A linear, small signal analysis of the PFD,
Four UTC photodetectors are also integrated on this PIC as (5), suggests that the output signal consists of two components:
well as transmission lines. Because the EIC can only provide a high frequency component with a double frequency but zero
a voltage between and , it is designed so that the average and a DC component with magnitude proportional to
UTC photodetectors can have positive voltage supplies to the the offset frequency . Since the PFD output is integrated by
-contact in order to deplete the collector. The circuit model is a low frequency hybrid loop filter, the low frequency component
shown in Fig. 5. Both and contacts are led to the GSG pads is the one to consider.
on the edges of the PIC by transmission lines, and a capacitor
is also integrated to provide a high frequency ground on the
PIC. The photodetector has a size of 3 20 . The designed
quantum efficiency is above 95%, and with a 50 load the (5)
3-dB bandwidth can be above 50 GHz depending on the contact
resistance. [23] By setting , the DC term of (5), provides an unam-
biguous frequency detection characteristics of .
B. Electronic IC and Loop Filter Due to the limiting amplifiers, the I/Q signals result in a hard
The electronics part of this Costas receiver includes an EIC limited square waves. In this case, the PFD output will provide a
and a loop filter. The BPSK receiver EIC is designed to work double frequency square wave with varying duty-cycle that de-
with the PIC having a 4-phase (I/Q) optical interferometer. With pends on the frequency offset, resulting in the same frequency
measurement of the I and Q signals, a signal proportional to detection characteristics. Measurement data of the PFD in fre-
optical frequency difference is formed by amplifying the I and quency detection mode is presented in then next section.
2248 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 31, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2013

At phase detection mode, when , the PFD output is

. The periodic phase detection characteristic, with a
factor of 2 in the sin argument makes the loop stable for both 0
and 180 degrees offset. This particular property allows the loop
to lock on a BPSK modulated carrier.
This EIC is fabricated using Teledyne’s 500 nm HBT process,
and each transistor has 300 GHz and .
The output of the EIC goes into a loop filter. It contains a
short passive path and an active path with longer delay [11].
A commercial Op-amp is used as the active component, and it
provides 200 MHz unity-gain bandwidth. The loop filter is built
on an AlN carrier with chip resistors and capacitors with a size
of 0201.

C. PIC to EIC Interconnections

Since the output of the UTC photodetectors are directly con-
nected to the EIC input and the signal frequencies can be as high
as 40 – 50 GHz, signal integrity may be a serious issue if the in-
terconnection is not well designed. Both RF pads on PIC and
EIC have a pitch size of 100 . In order to partially compen-
sate the inductance introduced by wirebonds, the ground-signal-
ground (GSG) pads on PIC are carefully designed to be a little
capacitive. The finite-element full-wave simulation shows that
as long as the wirebonding is shorter than 200 ( be-
tween the edges of the two GSG pads), 100 GHz interconnection
between can be achieved between PIC and EIC with less than
1 dB loss. The simulated S-parameters are shown in Fig. 7(a)
as well as a picture of the simulation model. Another situation
is also simulated, where the PIC and EIC are wirebonded to
the AlN carrier separately, and they are connected through the
co-planar waveguide on the carrier. The distance between the
two chips are 0.85 mm, and wire length is 380 from PIC to
carrier, and 500 from EIC to carrier. The simulation shows
that the 3-dB bandwidth is more than 40 GHz (Fig. 7(b)). The
latter case is used for this Costas receiver packaging.
The two pictures in Fig. 7(a) and (b) are plotted in different Fig. 7. Full-wave simulation results of the GSG pads for interconnections. The
scales, and the real device sizes are the same. As mentioned golden color represents gold, green color represents InP, and gray box represents
above, the GSG pads have a 100 pitch size, the signal pad AlN. (a) The wirebond is directly from one chip to the other. (b) The PIC and
on the PIC is 75-by-75 , and the signal pad on EIC is 75 EIC are wirebonded to the carrier separately, and they are connected through
the co-planar waveguide on the carrier.
wide and 100 long. The InP substrate thicknesses of both
PIC and EIC are 6 mil.

mirror reflectivity of the SG-DBR is not necessarily flat, the

IV. DEVICE CHARACTERIZATION AND SYSTEM MEASUREMENT lasing wavelength change leads to the change of mirror reflec-
tivity, which therefore changes the threshold current and the
A. Device Characterization
carrier density in the gain section. If the reflectivity slope is
The PIC and EIC are characterized separately before they are negative versus wavelength, the carrier density change in the
used to build the Costas receiver. laser gain section will increase with the current injection into the
The on-PIC SG-DBR laser shows a tuning range from 1541 phase tuning section, which favors the frequency tuning sensi-
to 1583 nm. For the - - measurement, only the gain section tivity. Otherwise, if the reflectivity slope is positive, the tuning
of the laser is biased, and the boosting semiconductor optical sensitivity is lower. The measurement shows that can
amplifier (SOA) next to the front mirror is reversed biased as vary roughly by a factor of 2, depending on how the lasing peak
an absorber to measure the output optical power. The threshold is aligned to the mirror reflection peak.
current of the SG-DBR laser is 25 mA, and with 180 mA bias, The RF response of the phase section is also measured. By
output power can almost reach 20 mW without the boosting injecting AC current into the phase diode, the laser is modu-
SOA [23]. Since the whole circuit is built on surface ridge wave- lated. The injected AC current generates two modulation side
guide structure, which provides small on-chip reflection, there lobes, which indicates the frequency response of the laser phase
is no injection locking has been observed. section. The measurement result is shown in Fig. 8. Curve fit-
The phase tuning section of the SG-DBR laser shows around ting confirms a pole at 100 MHz, which means the time constant
tuning sensitivity. Because the equals 1.59 ns. This also presents the carrier life time in
LU et al.: AN INTEGRATED 40 GBIT/S OPTICAL COSTAS RECEIVER 2249

Fig. 10. Microscope picture of the Costas receiver on the test stage. The DC
probe card provide DC supplies to the device from the top side of the image.
Fig. 8. Relative frequency response of the phase section diode in the SG-DBR The optical input and output are from the right hand side of the picture, and a
laser. four-signal-line RF probe is used to measure the demodulated I/Q output.

The more detailed testing results of this EIC is discussed in

[25], and the design, fabrication and measurement result of the
PIC can also be found in [22], [23].

B. OPLL Testing
The PIC, EIC and loop filter are then mounted on AlN car-
riers and wirebonded together. The size of the system is around
10 10 . The incoming signal is coupled into the PIC
through a lensed fiber, and the SG-DBR power is coupled out
to another lensed fiber through the back mirror for monitoring
Fig. 9. PFD standalone frequency detection response, measurements versus purpose. All the DC power supplies are connected through a
simulation [25]. DC probe card. The demodulated signal is obtained from the
EIC output ports. A microscope picture of the Costas receiver
is shown in Fig. 10, and PIC, EIC and loop filter are also labeled
the waveguide passive section of this integration form. The mis- in the picture.
match between experimental result and fitted curve at low fre- The Costas receiver is first tested as an OPLL. A tunable
quency is due to the cut-off frequency of the bias-Tee used in external cavity laser (ECL) is used as a reference laser with
the measurement. a linewidth of 80 kHz. The power of the reference laser is
The 90-degree hybrid is also characterized. The power im- first coupled into the Costas receiver directly without any
balance in the four photodetectors are within 5%, and the phase modulation, and the optical power of the SG-DBR laser is
can be exact, since there is a tunable phase shifter in the hybrid, coupled out from the PIC and beat with the reference on an
and the directional coupler always acts as an 180 degree hybrid, external high speed photodetector. An acousto-optic modulator
regardless of coupling ratio. (AOM) is applied to introduce a 100 MHz frequency offset. The
The UTC photodetector characterization is carried out by beating spectrum between the reference laser and phase-locked
using a lightwave component analyzer (LCA). The UTC pho- SG-DBR laser is observed on an electrical spectrum analyzer
todetector is wirebonded to the AlN carrier before testing, (ESA). The test setup is shown in Fig. 11(a), and the beating
since in the following system testing they have to be wire- spectrum on ESA is shown in Fig. 11(b) [18]. In Fig. 11(b), the
bonded. Amplitude modulated laser signal is coupled into the 100 MHz peak is the beating between the SG-DBR laser and
waveguide and detected by the UTC photodetector, and the RF the reference ECL when they are phase locked. The 1.2 GHz
response is then measured by the LCA. All the cable and probe peak is because of the damping of the OPLL, which indicates
losses are de-embedded. The measurement is based on the 50 the loop bandwidth, and the 1 GHz peak is the ‘folded’ peak
load. The 3-dB bandwidth is measured to be around 35 GHz from the lower sideband. Therefore, the frequency difference
with bias [22], [23]. The major limit of the bandwidth is between the main peak and the sidelobes is 1.1 GHz. Since the
from the contact resistance. The measured contact resistance of sidelobes are caused by the damping of the loop, the actually
this PIC is around 7000 , which leads to around 100 loop bandwidth is wider than the damping peaks [27]. The
contact resistance for each UTC photodetector. The saturation sidelobes set a lower limit for the actual closed-loop bandwidth,
current is 18 mA with bias. and the actual loop bandwidth is larger than 1.1 GHz. To the
As for the EIC, the electrical testing shows it fully functional. best of our knowledge, it is the widest OPLL bandwidth that
By adjusting the input frequency, the output voltage of the EIC has ever been reported.
is measured. As shown in Fig. 9, the measured result matches Loop bandwidth measurement is also done by introducing a
with simulation quite well. phase error signal in the loop. A phase modulator has
2250 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 31, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2013

Fig. 11. (a) The test setup for the OPLL. (b) The beating spectrum of the two
lasers when they are phase locked. The resolution bandwidth is 100 kHz. Fig. 12. (a) The test setup for loop bandwidth measurement. (b) shows the
measured loop bandwidth (solid line) and the simulation result (dash line) as a
comparison.
been included in the loop and relative loop response is measured
on the ESA [27]. The test setup is shown in Fig. 12(a). The phase
error is generated at the phase modulator, and the Frequency pull-in can only happen within one laser cavity
SG-DBR laser phase response to this phase error can be written mode.
as By turning on the feedback loop, the SG-DBR laser fre-
quency will be automatically pulled towards the reference laser
(6) frequency, and the phase lock loop starts to function when
the frequency difference is within around 1 GHz. It is worth
according to (4). Since the ESA measures the residual phase mentioning that it is the frequency locked-loop (FLL) that
noise spectrum between the SG-DBR laser and the unmodulated decides the pull-in range rather than the phase-locked loop, and
reference, the spectrum peak power, introduced by the modu- FLL pull-in range is decided by the delay line in the EIC and
lated reference, is proportional to the square of the closed-loop the laser cavity mode spacing. In other words, it is not limited
transfer function. by the OPLL bandwidth any more. The whole pull-in and
locking process takes hundreds of nanoseconds. The relatively
(7) slow frequency pull in is because of the bandwidth of the FLL
bandwidth. As a first order loop, the FLL only has a designed
bandwidth of 178 kHz. The frequency/phase pull-in curve is
where is the measured peak intensity on ESA, is shown in Fig. 13. It is measured by applying an on-off keying
the signal generator frequency and also the peak frequency on modulation on the incoming signal. The OPLL will have
ESA, and . The normalized measurement result is frequency/phase pull in and lock when the incoming signal
shown in Fig. 12(b) as well as the simulated closed-loop func- is ON, and lose lock when it is OFF. The in-phase output of
tion. The peaking at 1 GHz is probably because of the parasitic the EIC is monitored on a real-time oscilloscope. As we can
inductance in PIC and loop filter interconnection. see, the SG-DBR laser is locked and unlocked periodically.
Furthermore, frequency pull-in and phase-locking is ob- The frequency pull-in speed is still relatively slow in the range
served. By simply tuning on the loop, the two lasers are phase of hundreds of nano-second. However, by redesign the loop
locked automatically. Even under the condition that the original characteristics, the pull-in speed can be possibly decreased by
frequency offset between two lasers is as large as 17.5 GHz, roughly two orders.
success frequency pull-in and phase locking has been observed In addition, more than 30 GHz ( single-sideband)
after tuning on the loop. The pull-in range is dependent on the hold-in range has been observed. Within a 2.6 temperature
working conditions of the OPLL, especially on the LO laser. fluctuation, the OPLL stays locked.
LU et al.: AN INTEGRATED 40 GBIT/S OPTICAL COSTAS RECEIVER 2251

Fig. 13. The real-time oscilloscope result of the OPLL frequency pull-in and
phase locking. Four periods are shown in (a), and (b) shows another set of time
domain data with a smaller span.

C. Linewidth and Phase Noise Measurement

As for the linewidth measurement, self-heterodyne method
is used. The laser under testing is split into two branches, a
25-km fiber delay is in one branch to get rid of the coherence
and an acousto-optic modulator (AOM) is in the other branch
to introduce the 100-MHz offset frequency. The linewidth of
the reference laser is first measured, and 80 kHz full width at
half maximum (FWHM) linewidth is obtained. The free-run-
ning SG-DBR (LO) laser linewidth has also been measured Fig. 14. (a) The test setup for linewidth measurement. (b) shows the mea-
using the same method, and the FWHM linewidth is roughly sured linewidth of the reference laser (red), the free running SG-DBR (LO) laser
(black), the phase-locked SG-DBR laser without modulated signal input (green),
10 MHz. and the phase-locked SG-DBR with BPSK modulated signal input (blue). A
The SG-DBR laser is then phase locked to the reference laser, zoomed-in plot is shown in the upper right corner. The resolution bandwidths
and the linewidth of the phase-locked SG-DBR laser is mea- are 50 kHz and 3 kHz, respectively.
sured. After applying the BPSK-modulated signal on the ref-
erence laser, the linewidth of the SG-DBR laser has been mea-
sured again. The test setup is shown in Fig. 14(a), and the results in the Mach-Zehnder Interfermeter formed by two 2-by-2 fiber
can be found in Fig. 14(b). As we can see, the locked SG-DBR couplers, which may lead to higher low-frequency residual
laser has the same linewidth as the reference, even when the phase noise. Another possible cause is the fiber mismatch. If
reference is modulated by a BPSK signal. The data rate is 25 the fiber path length matching is not perfect, the laser phase
Gbit/s, and pseudo-random binary sequence (PRBS) noise will not be totally canceled out, and consequently shown
data is used. on the OPLL phase noise.
The phase noise of this OPLL system is also measured on
the ESA, and the test setup is shown in Fig. 15(a). In order D. Bit Error Rate Measurement
to cancel out the reference laser noise, the fiber length is well As for data reception of a Costas loop, the same as DSP-
matched with a length error smaller than 1 meter. As indicated based intradyne systems, phase ambiguity needs to be taken into
in Fig. 15(b), the phase noise curves with and without data mod- consideration. The incoming signal phase will be doubled in
ulation match very well, which confirms that there is no observ- the quadri-correlator PFD, by which the 0 and signal phase
able data-OPLL cross talk in this Costas receiver, and also veri- will be erased. However, the carrier phase will also be doubled
fies the good matching in the linewidth measurement. The phase at the same time, which means that the carrier phase of and
noise of the RF source that is used to drive the AOM is also become identical and indistinguishable to the OPLL. One
measured for comparison. For all four sets of measurement, the way to solve this phase ambiguity problem is using differential
signal power is always kept at , and the background encoding and decoding.
noise is taken based on the assumption of the same signal power. In the experiment, since PRBS data is used (the differential
Comparing the OPLL phase noise with the signal generator sequence of a PRBS is itself), no encoder is needed at the trans-
phase noise, both of them reach the ESA noise floor at the mitter side. On the receiver output, the output data sequence
frequency above 50 kHz, and the 1.1 GHz peak indicates the needs to be decoded. One bit delay is introduced to the output,
closed-loop bandwidth. However, at frequencies below 50 kHz, and an XOR operation is carried out on the and delayed sig-
the OPLL present more noise compared to the RF source. This nals, and resulting output of the XOR gate is the inverse of the
low frequency noise component is believed to be introduced by original PRBS sequence. The output of the XOR gate is con-
the test setup rather than OPLL itself. The fiber vibration can nected to a bit error rate tester (BERT), and BER is then ob-
be one of the possible justifications. It causes phase fluctuation tained. The eye diagram is measured at the EIC output directly
2252 JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 31, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2013

Fig. 17. (a) The eye diagrams of received data at 25 Gbit/s and 40 Gbit/s.
(b) The bit error rate measurement results of the coherent receiver. The BER
vs OSNR curves were measured at the data rate of 20, 25, 28, 35, 40 Gbit/s. The
theoretical curve is also plotted at 25 Gbit/s data rate for an ideal receiver.

Fig. 15. (a) The test setup for phase noise measurement. (PLM: path length
matching.) (b) shows the measured phase noise of the beating between the
phase-locked SG-DBR laser and the reference laser with (red) and without used to change the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). An op-
(black) data modulation. The ESA background noise (blue), and the 100-MHz tical filter with an FWHM bandwidth of 0.95 nm is used to filter
RF signal phase noise (green) are also plotted. out the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise from the
EDFA. The incoming signal is coupled to the receiver through a
lensed fiber, and demodulated signal is detected by a 50 Gbit/s
BERT through the decoding circuit. The BER is measured by
the BERT. The RF cable is kept as short as possible to avoid ex-
cessive loss from the receiver to the measurement equipment.
The measured eye diagrams at 25 and 40 Gbit/s are shown in
Fig. 17(a), from which we can see the eyes are fairly open even
at 40 Gbit/s. The BER measurement are carried out at the bit
rates of 20, 25, 28, 35, and 40 Gbit/s. By varying the VOA,
the OSNR from the EDFA output changes, and therefore the
BERs are measured at different OSNR. The results are shown in
Fig. 17(b). The theoretical BER for an ideal receiver is also cal-
culated at 25 Gbit/s data rate. Comparing the measured BER and
the theoretical BER, there is a 6–10 dB OSNR penalty. There
are several potential factors that may introduce this difference.
First, the residual LO laser phase noise may have influence on
Fig. 16. Test setup for the BER measurement. The three dashed boxes indicate
the transmitter, the receiver and the section that is used to vary the OSNR. The the receiver power penalty. Since the free running LO has a
rest parts of the test setup are for monitoring purpose. linewidth of 10 MHz, even with a 1 GHz OPLL loop band-
width, the residual phase noise can be more than 10 degrees,
which will cause a higher BER for the receiver performance,
without the decoding circuit, and a 70 GHz sampled oscillo- especially when OSNR is high. Second, since the device is not
scope with a remote sampling head is used. Since the application packaged, mechanical vibration can possibly cause worse BER.
of limiting amplifiers in EIC, BER cannot be estimated from the More specifically, the vibration of the fiber coupling can intro-
eye diagrams. duce optical amplitude noise on the photodetector, and the am-
The test setup is shown in Fig. 16. The transmitter part is the plitude noise will pass through OPLL and change the LO laser
same as the previous experiments, and PRBS pattern phase and introduce phase error in consequence. The phase error
is used. A variable optical attenuator (VOA) and an EDFA are variance of the OPLL directly influences the BER.
LU et al.: AN INTEGRATED 40 GBIT/S OPTICAL COSTAS RECEIVER 2253

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