February 2017 edition – Vol.9 no.2

2023 International Conference on Microelectronics (ICM)
from December 17 to 20, 2023, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
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2023 IEEE 11th International Conference on Systems and Control (ICSC)
from December 18 to 20, 2023, Sousse, Tunisia.
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2024 37th International Conference on VLSI Design and 2024 23rd International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID)
from January 6 to 10, 2024, Kolkata, India.
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2024 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC)
from February 18 to 22, 2024, San Francisco, California, USA.
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2024 IEEE 15th Latin America Symposium on Circuits and Systems (LASCAS)
from February 27 to March 1, 2024, Punta del Este, Uruguay.
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2024 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC)
from April 21 to 24, 2024, Denver, Colorado, USA.
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2024 IEEE 6th International Conference on AI Circuits and Systems (AICAS)
from April 22 to 25, 2024, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
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2024 9th International Conference on Integrated Circuits, Design, and Verification (ICDV)
from June 6 to 7, 2024, Hanoi, Vietnam.
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2024 61st ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)
from June 23 to 27, 2024, San Francisco, California, USA.
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2024 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
from July 15 to 19, 2024, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
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Prof. Odile Liboiron-Ladouceur
McGill University
Member of ReSMiQ since 2010

Odile Liboiron-Ladouceur received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York, USA. She is currently an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Photonics Interconnect at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, Quebec, Canada. Prof. Liboiron-Ladouceur held a position as an application engineer in the Mass Storage Business Unit at Teradyne in Boston, MA, USA. She worked as Design/Test Engineer in the Optical Business Unit at Texas Instruments in Dallas, TX, USA. Her research interests are in the area of photonic interconnects for data communication in high performing modern computing platforms, the development of new technology and architectures for energy-efficient optical interconnection networks, and the fabrication of Photonic Integrated Circuits (SOI, SiN, III-V) to increase the throughput of optical interconnects. She is the author or coauthor of more than 45 papers in peer-reviewed journals and 90 papers in conference proceedings. She holds three patents and has filed three other patents.  Prof. Liboiron-Ladouceur has served in different IEEE committees and conferences in the optical and photonics domains and has been an elected member of the IEEE Photonics Society Board of Governors. She is a senior IEEE member and currently is the Montreal Chapter Chair of the IEEE Photonics Society and Associate Editor of the IEEE Photonics Technology Letters. More details

Below is a selection of publications in recent years followed by representative work.

1. M. Moayedi Pour Fard*, G. Cowan, O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, “Responsivity optimization of a high-speed germanium-on-silicon photodetector,” OSA Optics Express, 24(24), 27738-27752, Nov. 2016. (IF: 3.15)
2. M.S. Hai* and O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, “Low-Loss Passive Si3N4 Serial-to-WDM Interface for Energy-Efficient Optical Interconnects,” IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology, 34(23), 5444-5452, Oct. 2016 (IF: 2.57)
3. M.S. Hai*, M. Moayedi Pour Fard*, O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, “A Ring-based 25 Gb/s DAC-less PAM-4 Modulator,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 22(6), 123-130, Nov.-Dec. 2016. (IF: 3.47)
4. M. Nikdast*, G. Nicolescu, J. Trajkovic, O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, “Chip-Scale Silicon Photonic Interconnects: A Formal Study on Fabrication Non-Uniformity,” IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, 34(16), 3682-3695, Aug.15, 2016. (IF: 2.57)
5. C. Williams*, B. Banan*, G. Cowan, O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, “A Source-Synchronous Architecture Using Mode-Division Multiplexing for Source-Synchronous On-Chip Optical Interconnects,” IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 22(6), 473-481, Nov.-Dec. 2016 (IF: 2.83)
6. S. Faralli, F. Gambini, P. Pitus, M. Scaffardi, O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, Y. Xiong, P. Castoldi, N. Andriolli, I. Cerutti, “Bidirectional Transmission in an Optical Network on Chip with Bus and Ring Topologies,” IEEE Photonics Journal, 8(2), 1-8, April 2016. (IF: 2.231)
7. F. Göhring de Magalhaes*, R. Priti*, M. Nikdast*, F. Hessel, O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, G. Nicolescu, “Design and Modelling of a Low-Latency Centralized Controller for Optical Integrated Networks,” IEEE Communications Letters, 20(3), 462–465, March 2016. (IF: 1.27).
8. B. Banan*, R. Niall Tait, O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, and P. Berini, “Fabrication of metal strip waveguides for optical and microwave data transmission,” Journal of Vacuum Science & Technology B, 33(6), November/December 2015. (IF: 1.46)
9. M.S. Hai*, M. Ménard, and O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, “Integrated optical deserialiser time sampling based SiGe photoreceiver,” OSA Optics Express, 23(25), 31736-54, 15 December 2015. (IF: 3.488)
10. M. Moayedi Pour Fard*, G. Cowan, and O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, “Analysis of Low-Bit Soft-Decision Error Correction in Optical Front Ends,” OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, 7(9), 885–897, August 2015. (IF: 1.547)

A Ring-Based 25 Gb/s DAC-Less PAM-4 Modulator

A novel PAM-4 12.5 Gbaud/s inter-coupling modulator based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer assisted ring resonator is demonstrated. The 25 Gb/s PAM-4 optical signal is generated by driving the modulator with two independent electrical signals with an amplitude of 3 Vpp at 2 V reverse bias. Reverse bias operation mode of the modulator enables achieving an electro-optic (EO) bandwidth of approximately 14 GHz without pre-emphasis of the electrical driving signals or equalization techniques. This configuration (Fig. 1) successfully simplifies the operation of the modulator in generating PAM-4 signals without the need for a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Experimental results show proper generation of a PRBS data stream (Fig. 3). The proposed modulator has a compact footprint of 0.48 mm2 (Fig. 2) with a bandwidth density of 52.08 Gb/s/mm2.

Fig. 1. Schematic of the proposed inter-coupling modulation based PAM-4 ring modulator. The optical signal modulation is enabled by coupling modulation, change in the round-trip phase shift and slight variation of its loss. The modulator has two p-n diode segments in the lower arm of the balanced MZI with lengths of  LLSB = 220 μm and  LMSB = 330 μm. There are also two thermal heaters that were implemented with the top metal layer. The smallest p–n diode segment generates a phase shift Δφ1 with an RF signal V1 representing the lowest significant bit (LSB). The largest p–n diode segment generates a phase shift Δφ2 with an RF signal V2 representing the MSB.

Fig. 2. Microscopic image of the designed ring modulator on chip excluding the optical grating couplers.

Fig. 3. Eye diagrams (12.5 Gb/s) at the output of the ring modulator when driven by (a) only V1 (MSB), (b) only V2 (LSB). The corresponding electrical eye diagrams are shown at the left.