Electrical package impact on VCSEL-based optical interconnects

A new CAD tool fREEDA® based on state variable approach and universal error concept is presented for modelling and simulating systems where physical domains such as electrical, thermal, and optical interact with each other. A single implementation of device equations in fREEDA® can be used with different analysis types such as transient and harmonic balance, etc. To demonstrate the multi-physics capabilities of fREEDA®, we present a study of the impact of electrical packages on the source module performance in multi-gigabit per second vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL)-based optical interconnects. The effect of various operating conditions such as bias/drive level and driver configuration are studied. We consider electrical packages such as printed wire board, thin-film and flip-chip in our study. A comparison of VCSELs with stripe lasers is also presented.