Optical interconnects to silicon

Abstract

Abstract-This paper gives a brief historical summary of the development of the field of optical interconnects to silicon integrated circuits. It starts from roots in early optical switching phenomena, proceeds through novel semiconductor and quantum well optical and optoelectronic physics and devices, first proposals for optical interconnects, and optical computing and photonic switching demonstrators, to hybrid integrations of optoelectronic and silicon circuits that may solve basic scaling and other problems for interconnections in future information processing and switching machines.

Picosecond diode-pumped 1.5 μm Er,Yb:glass lasers operating at 10–100 GHz repetition rate

“…Although this stability criterion is strictly speaking not valid for high repetition rate lasers, as some of the assumptions made to derive (1) are not fulfilled for multi-GHz lasers, it still can be used to obtain some useful design guidelines. For a more detailed discussion on the influence of additional effects on the QML-threshold such as two-photon absorption or incomplete recovery of the absorber, refer to [22,25,26].…”

“…Nevertheless (1) reveals the engineering parameters which can be used to obtain stable mode-locking: the effective mode areas A eff,L in the gain medium and A eff,L on the absorber, which can be influenced by the cavity design of the laser, and the parameters of the saturable absorber, namely the modulation depth R and the saturation fluence F sat,A . Equation (1) implies that the effective mode areas should be minimized while the saturable absorber should exhibit low saturation fluence together with a reasonably low modulation depth.…”

“…There are numerous applications for multi-GHz laser sources in science and technology such as optical clocking [1], photonic switching [2] or high-speed electro-optic sampling [3], just to mention a few. Multi-GHz mode-locked lasers emitting in the 1.5 µm spectral range are particularly interesting for fiber-optical telecommunication applications as they operate in the window of minimal glass absorption, which enables long-haul data transfer.…”

Novel Polarization Rotators for Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits

“…The silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform has been a great potential for high-density photonic integrated circuits (PICs) due to its high refractive index contrast between silicon and silica and the compatibility with the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology [1][2][3]. However, the greatly di erent propagation properties of the transverse-electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) modes induced by high refractive index contrast result in the polarization mode dispersion (PMD), polarization *Corresponding Author: Chyong-Hua Chen: Department of Photonics and Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan, E-mail: chyong@mail.nctu.edu.tw Kuei Ho Chen: Department of Photonics and Institute of ElectroOptical Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan dependent loss (PDL) and polarization dependent wavelength (PDλ) in the waveguide.…”

Advanced silicon processing for active planar photonic devices

“…Hybrid systems enable applications that were previously impossible or ineffective in silicon, such as lasers 1 and biosensing. 2 Hybrid optical systems are of particular interest, as they use silicon's capability for low loss passive waveguides 3 but use other materials to avoid functionality limitations from silicon's indirect bandgap. However, direct integration through epitaxy of these systems is problematic due to differences in the lattice constant and thermal expansion coefficients.…”