Silicon photonics platform for national security applications

Abstract

We review Sandia's silicon photonics platform for national security applications. Silicon photonics offers the potential for extensive size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-c) reductions compared to existing III-V or purely electronics circuits. Unlike most silicon photonics foundries in the US and internationally, our silicon photonics is manufactured in a trusted environment at our Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Application (MESA) facility. The Sandia fabrication facility is certified as a trusted foundry and can therefore produce devices and circuits intended for military applications. We will describe a variety of silicon photonics devices and subsystems, including both monolithic and heterogeneous integration of silicon photonics with electronics, that can enable future complex functionality in aerospace systems, principally focusing on communications technology in optical interconnects and optical networking.

Attojoule Optoelectronics for Low-Energy Information Processing and Communications

“…47 If we could do that, we could combine the power from two cool black bodies to heat up a warmer one, for example. 48 For optical concentration into a minimum-sized photodetector, the best we can do in general in a multimode system where we do not know the relative coherence between the power in the different modes is to concentrate the power from the most powerful mode into the minimum-sized photodetector; all power In general, we can only use the power in the most strongly coupled mode; power in other modes is wasted. So, we want to run with optics that creates and retains the power of a given signal in one spatial mode.…”

“…Optical fibers can carry high data rates over very thin (e.g., 125 μm diameter) "wires". Smaller waveguides (e.g., ~ 0.2 -3 μm cross-sectional dimensions) are also possible on substrates, as in silicon photonics [47], [48], [49], [50], [51], [52], [53], [54], [55], [56], [57], [58], [59], [60] and integrated III-V photonics [61]. There are the additional opportunities of much larger amounts of information transmission using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) (use of multiple different wavelengths as independent channels) or space-division multiplexing (SDM); SDM could use multiple spatial modes in a fiber (mode-division multiplexing) or free-space, two-dimensional interconnects off the surface of the chip (see Section VII below).…”

PR38 Progress Towards Integrated Photon-Pair Sources and Their Applications (1640968-Y5)

“…Devices were designed and fabricated at Sandia National Labs using a multiproject wafer process for silicon photonics [8].…”

PR34 Improved Photon-Pair Generation using Silicon Photonic Micro-resonators (1640968-Y1)

“…(iii) A microphotonic architecture for a time-bin entanglement QKD transmitter was designed, using integrated silicon photonic components. The chip is currently being fabricated at Sandia National Labs using the multi-project wafer process [14].…”