One embodiment can provide an optical transceiver based on silicon photonics. The optical transceiver can include an optical transmitter and an optical receiver. The optical transmitter or the optical receiver can include one or more semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) configured to amplify optical signals to be transmitted by the optical transmitter or optical signals received by the optical receiver, respectively, thereby facilitating the optical transceiver to meet an optical power budget requirement of a high-speed optical link.