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By leveraging on the wealth of Si-CMOS technology know-how and the largely available infrastructures, the fundamental photonic device building blocks and circuit integration platform, essential for the realization of the electronic-photonic integrated circuit (EPIC), have been successfully developed. This presentation gives an overview on the current status of this critical technology and provides the outlook for the monolithic integration of Si microphotonics with the help of some demonstrated examples.

By leveraging on the wealth of Si-CMOS technology know-how and the largely available infrastructures, the fundamental photonic device building blocks and circuit integration platform, essential for the realization of the electronic-photonic integrated circuit (EPIC), have been successfully developed. This presentation gives an overview on the current status of this critical technology and provides the outlook for the monolithic integration of Si microphotonics with the help of some demonstrated examples.

Silicon Photonics taps on the volume manufacturing capability of traditional silicon manufacturing techniques, to provide dramatic cost reduction for various application domains employing optical communications technology. In addition, an important new application domain would be the implementation of high bandwidth optical interconnects in and around CPUs. Besides volume manufacturability, Silicon Photonics also allows the monolithic integration of multiple optical components on the same wafer to realize highly compact photonic integrated circuits (PICs), in which functional complexity can be increased for little additional cost. An important pre-requisite for Si PICs is a device library in which the devices are compatibly developed around a common SOI platform. A device library comprising passive and active components was built, which includes light guiding components, wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) components, switches, carrier-based Si modulators and electro-absorption based Ge/Si modulators, Ge/Si photodiodes and avalanche photodiodes, as well as light emitting devices. By integrating various library devices, PIC test vehicles such as monolithic PON transceivers and DWDM receivers have been demonstrated. A challenge with Si PICs lies with the coupling of light into and out of the sub-micrometer Si waveguides. The mode size mismatch of optical fibers and Si waveguides was addressed by developing a monolithically integrated multi-stage mode converter which offers low loss together with relaxed fiber-to-waveguide alignment tolerances. An active assembly platform using MEMS technology was also developed to actively align and focus light from bonded lasers into waveguides.

Severe information latency and power consumption are key technology challenges facing the traditional copper interconnects which impose tremendous constraints to keep up with the performance roadmap driven by the Moore's Law. Converging electronic and photonic integrated circuits (EPIC) on a single chip platform to enable functional diversification emerges as one promising approach which could be realized by taking the advantage of low energy and huge data capacity of optical interconnects. By leveraging on the wealth of CMOS technology know-how and infrastructures, the fundamental photonics building blocks constructing the EPIC platform have been successfully developed in this work. We present an overview on the current status of this critical technology development and provide an outlook for the monolithic integration of Si micro- and nano-photonics. It is our belief that a seamless integration of EPIC is poised to become a promising technology to meet the bandwidth and energy requirements of future data communication.

Research into the limits of electrical interconnects indicates that metal wire is unlikely to be the ultimate solution to support the growing functionalities of next generation microprocessor. Severe information latency and power consumption are key technological challenges facing the traditional copper interconnects which impose tremendous constraints to keep up with the performance roadmap known as Moore's Law. The shift of paradigm in computer architecture that enables significant parallelism based on a radically new communication landscape will be a remarkable breakthrough. Converging electronic and photonic integrated circuits (EPIC) on a single chip platform to enable functional diversification emerges as one promising approach which could be realized by taking the advantage of low energy and huge data capacity of optical interconnects. By leveraging on the wealth of CMOS technology know-how and infrastructures, the fundamental photonics building blocks that are essential for the demonstration of low-cost EPIC platform have been successfully developed in this work. We present an overview on the current status of this critical technology development and provide an outlook for the monolithic integration of Si micro- and nano-photonics. A seamless integration of EPIC is poised to become a promising technology to meet the bandwidth and energy requirements of data communication in future technology nodes.