In this paper, an ultra-low power consumption optical transmitter is developed to broaden the application of optical communication in short-reach interconnection such as board level and backplane level. The basic principle of the scheme is that the Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (VCSEL) laser generates an optical pulse signal after loading a bias current and a modulation signal through a Bias-T circuit.

In this work, the feasibility of the scheme is verified by means of simulation. It is also found that the main factors affecting the increase of the transmission rate are the parasitic parameters of the laser device and the impedance matching of the drive circuit. The two electrical transmission distances of 200 and 10 mm are studied by experiments. And the law of eye diagram quality and bit error rate as a function of driving voltage and bias current is studied through experiments under two electrical transmission distances.

The results show that a larger effective extinction ratio ranging from 0.84 to 6.69 dB can be obtained by shortening the electrical transmission distance to 10 mm with the minimum differential driving voltage of 200 mV, the minimum bias current of 15 mA, and the power consumption of 1.2 mW/Gbit/s. Compared with traditional optical modules, the power consumption of optical transmission is reduced by about 80%.

This optical transmitter solution can be applied to intra-data center. Combined with low-power optical receivers, the overall power consumption of the data center can be significantly reduced.