Integration of silicon photonics in bulk CMOS

Meade, Roy; Orcutt, Jason S.; Mehta, Karan K.; Tehar-Zahav, Ofer; Miller, Daniel; Georgas, Michael; Moss, Benjamin; Sun, Chen; Chen, Yu‐Hsin; Shainline, Jeffrey M.; Wade, Mark T.; Bafrali, Reha; Sternberg, Zvi; Machavariani, G.; Sandhu, Gurtej; Popović, Miloš A.; Ram, Rajeev J.; Stojanović, Vladimir

doi:10.1109/vlsit.2014.6894427

Cited by 17 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Applicability to CMOS Processes with Bulk Silicon Substrates. CMOS processes utilizing a bulk silicon substrate lack a patternable crystalline silicon layer, motivating alternative devices in polysilicon and a small number of process changes 36 . However, some guiding principles of zerochange integration, such as reuse of existing transistor mask levels, repurposing of transistor materials for optics, and compact integration through silicon microrings, can be applied to minimize changes to the process frontend, which are the most harmful to process-native electronics.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, some guiding principles of zerochange integration, such as reuse of existing transistor mask levels, repurposing of transistor materials for optics, and compact integration through silicon microrings, can be applied to minimize changes to the process frontend, which are the most harmful to process-native electronics. These concepts have been applied successfully in practice to enable functional photonics in bulk 26,36 , though at far smaller scale. Correspondence Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Vladimir Stojanović (email: vlada@berkeley.edu), Miloš Popović (email: milos.popovic@colorado.edu), Rajeev Ram (email: rajeev@mit.edu), or Krste Asanović (email: krste@berkeley.edu).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light

Sun

Wade

Lee

et al. 2015

Nature

Self Cite

1,086

543

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Data transport across short electrical wires is limited by both bandwidth and power density, which creates a performance bottleneck for semiconductor microchips in modern computer systems--from mobile phones to large-scale data centres. These limitations can be overcome by using optical communications based on chip-scale electronic-photonic systems enabled by silicon-based nanophotonic devices. However, combining electronics and photonics on the same chip has proved challenging, owing to microchip manufacturing conflicts between electronics and photonics. Consequently, current electronic-photonic chips are limited to niche manufacturing processes and include only a few optical devices alongside simple circuits. Here we report an electronic-photonic system on a single chip integrating over 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components that work together to provide logic, memory, and interconnect functions. This system is a realization of a microprocessor that uses on-chip photonic devices to directly communicate with other chips using light. To integrate electronics and photonics at the scale of a microprocessor chip, we adopt a 'zero-change' approach to the integration of photonics. Instead of developing a custom process to enable the fabrication of photonics, which would complicate or eliminate the possibility of integration with state-of-the-art transistors at large scale and at high yield, we design optical devices using a standard microelectronics foundry process that is used for modern microprocessors. This demonstration could represent the beginning of an era of chip-scale electronic-photonic systems with the potential to transform computing system architectures, enabling more powerful computers, from network infrastructure to data centres and supercomputers.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light

Sun

Wade

Lee

et al. 2015

Nature

Self Cite

1,086

543

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This means that the quantum efficiency of the present geometry can reach at least 20% in the long-device limit. Furthermore, results in a 0.18 lm bulk CMOS node 20 show that the propagation loss of optimized polysilicon waveguides can be as low as 10 dB/cm. Because of the small optical overlap with the polysilicon rib of the current geometry (Fig.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Waveguide-coupled detector in zero-change complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor

Alloatti

Srinivasan

Orcutt

et al. 2015

Applied Physics Letters

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In 2014, the first monolithic integration of photonic and electronic devices on the bulk CMOS was reported [ 49 ]. The most challenging part is the waveguide integration with a low propagation loss.…”

Section: Silicon Photonics For High-speed Data Communicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A DWDM optical transceiver is monolithically integrated on a 0.18-μm bulk CMOS process with all the optical devices implemented using polysilicon without relying on the epitaxial crystallization of silicon or the introduction of Ge. By applying the same approaches presented in [ 49 ], low-loss photonic devices including waveguides, couplers, micro-ring modulators, and PDs can be successfully integrated with minimal modifications to the original CMOS process. Moreover, based on the micro-ring structures, 9-wavelength TX and RX DWDM macros are also realized as shown in Figure 10 .…”

Section: Silicon Photonics For High-speed Data Communicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of CMOS Integrated Circuit Technologies for High-Speed Photo-Detection

Jeong

Bae

Jeong

2017

Sensors

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The bandwidth requirement of wireline communications has increased exponentially because of the ever-increasing demand for data centers and high-performance computing systems. However, it becomes difficult to satisfy the requirement with legacy electrical links which suffer from frequency-dependent losses due to skin effects, dielectric losses, channel reflections, and crosstalk, resulting in a severe bandwidth limitation. In order to overcome this challenge, it is necessary to introduce optical communication technology, which has been mainly used for long-reach communications, such as long-haul networks and metropolitan area networks, to the medium- and short-reach communication systems. However, there still remain important issues to be resolved to facilitate the adoption of the optical technologies. The most critical challenges are the energy efficiency and the cost competitiveness as compared to the legacy copper-based electrical communications. One possible solution is silicon photonics which has long been investigated by a number of research groups. Despite inherent incompatibility of silicon with the photonic world, silicon photonics is promising and is the only solution that can leverage the mature complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies. Silicon photonics can be utilized in not only wireline communications but also countless sensor applications. This paper introduces a brief review of silicon photonics first and subsequently describes the history, overview, and categorization of the CMOS IC technology for high-speed photo-detection without enumerating the complex circuital expressions and terminologies.

show abstract

Integration of silicon photonics in bulk CMOS

Cited by 17 publications

References 2 publications

Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light

Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light

Waveguide-coupled detector in zero-change complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor

Review of CMOS Integrated Circuit Technologies for High-Speed Photo-Detection

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About