Rationale and challenges for optical interconnects to electronic chips

Miller, David A. B.

doi:10.1109/5.867687

Cited by 1,041 publications

(479 citation statements)

References 134 publications

(145 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

477

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Our results highlight how nanostructure growth can complement the rise of silicon photonics by populating these chips with high-performance and small-footprint active III-V devices. In doing so, extremely complex chip-scale optoelectronic functions will emerge with ramifications for myriad applications such as optical interconnects 3 , light detection and ranging 5 , threedimensional (3D) displays 47 , retinal prosthesis 39 and more. The vertical nature of the nanoresonators presented here may incidentally also facilitate future 3D integrated circuits 14 .…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By combining components that generate, detect and otherwise control light, PICs facilitate design of photonic architectures that prove far more powerful than any single photonic element alone. Already, they have sparked great interest for communications and computing technology 3,4 . Other rapidly emerging applications meanwhile include light detection and ranging 5 , optofluidics 6 and more.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Nanophotonic integrated circuits from nanoresonators grown on silicon

Chen

et al. 2014

Nat Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Harnessing light with photonic circuits promises to catalyse powerful new technologies much like electronic circuits have in the past. Analogous to Moore's law, complexity and functionality of photonic integrated circuits depend on device size and performance scale. Semiconductor nanostructures offer an attractive approach to miniaturize photonics. However, shrinking photonics has come at great cost to performance, and assembling such devices into functional photonic circuits has remained an unfulfilled feat. Here we demonstrate an on-chip optical link constructed from InGaAs nanoresonators grown directly on a silicon substrate. Using nanoresonators, we show a complete toolkit of circuit elements including light emitters, photodetectors and a photovoltaic power supply. Devices operate with gigahertz bandwidths while consuming subpicojoule energy per bit, vastly eclipsing performance of prior nanostructure-based optoelectronics. Additionally, electrically driven stimulated emission from an as-grown nanostructure is presented for the first time. These results reveal a roadmap towards future ultradense nanophotonic integrated circuits.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nanophotonic integrated circuits from nanoresonators grown on silicon

Chen

et al. 2014

Nat Commun

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In the conversion from photons to electrons by photodetectors, this size incompatibility often leads to substantial penalties in power dissipation, area, latency and noise [1][2][3][4] . A photodetector can be made smaller by using a subwavelength active region; however, this can result in very low responsivity because of the diffraction limit of the light.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nanometre-scale germanium photodetector enhanced by a near-infrared dipole antenna

et al. 2008

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A critical challenge for the convergence of optics and electronics is that the micrometre scale of optics is significantly larger than the nanometre scale of modern electronic devices. In the conversion from photons to electrons by photodetectors, this size incompatibility often leads to substantial penalties in power dissipation, area, latency and noise [1][2][3][4] . A photodetector can be made smaller by using a subwavelength active region; however, this can result in very low responsivity because of the diffraction limit of the light. Here we exploit the idea of a half-wave Hertz dipole antenna (length 380 nm) from radio waves, but at near-infrared wavelengths (length 1.3 mm), to concentrate radiation into a nanometre-scale germanium photodetector. This gives a polarization contrast of a factor of 20 in the resulting photocurrent in the subwavelength germanium element, which has an active volume of 0.00072 mm 3 , a size that is two orders of magnitude smaller than previously demonstrated detectors at such wavelengths.The interaction of light with nanostructured metals has been studied extensively in recent years [5][6][7][8][9][10] . The resulting near-field optical intensity can be two to three orders of magnitude higher than the incident intensity. However, very little research has been carried out into the interaction of these strong near fields with semiconductors and the further transformation of the optical energy into electricity [11][12][13] . It has recently been demonstrated that the photogeneration of carriers in silicon can be enhanced by a surface-plasmon antenna at a wavelength of 840 nm (ref. 12). This method has the practical limitation that the entire grating structure necessary for exciting a surface-plasmon resonance occupies a large area in terms of wavelengths. Alternatively, a C-shaped aperture has been used to enhance photodetection locally without exciting long-range surface-plasmon resonances 13 . However, for easy integration and high-speed, low-capacitance operation, it is generally advantageous to design planar devices such as the metal -semiconductor-metal (MSM) detectors that are widely used in high-speed optical receivers 14 .Resonant antennas can confine strong optical near fields in a subwavelength volume, as demonstrated recently for bow-tie antennas and dipole antennas at visible wavelengths using the resulting scattered light 15,16 . The optical properties of the structures largely depend on the size and shape of the antennas.

show abstract

“…Currently, intrachip, inter-chip, and inter-board connections are being investigated for manufacturing feasibility [59].…”

Section: Efficiency In Interconnection Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Electrical wires suffer from induced noise and heat, which increases dramatically whenever wires are made thinner or placed closer together, or whenever the data throughput is increased [59]. As a direct consequence of their resistance-free pathways and noisereduced environments, optical systems have the potential to generate less waste heat and so consume less energy per computation step than electronic systems [14].…”

Section: Energy Efficiencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Optical computing

Woods¹,

Naughton²

2009

Applied Mathematics and Computation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We consider optical computers that encode data using images and compute by transforming such images. We give an overview of a number of such optical computing architectures, including descriptions of the type of hardware commonly used in optical computing, as well as some of the computational efficiencies of optical devices. We go on to discuss optical computing from the point of view of computational complexity theory, with the aim of putting some old, and some very recent, results in context. Finally, we focus on a particular optical model of computation called the continuous space machine. We describe some results for this model including characterisations in terms of well-known complexity classes.

show abstract

Rationale and challenges for optical interconnects to electronic chips

Cited by 1,041 publications

References 134 publications

Nanophotonic integrated circuits from nanoresonators grown on silicon

Nanophotonic integrated circuits from nanoresonators grown on silicon

Nanometre-scale germanium photodetector enhanced by a near-infrared dipole antenna

Optical computing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About