Silicon Optoelectronics

Technology Work Group

Chairs

Jerry Bautista, Intel
Michael Morse, Intel
Jeffrey Swift, formerly Analog Devices

Participants: MIT and Industry Consortium Member Companies

Participants: Other Companies

Summary

Silicon-based microphotonics has been under great scrutiny in recent years. The prospect of extending a massive, low cost electronics manufacturing platform into the photonics domain is the subject of much research and debate. What has become more clear is that an important driver for the debate is the intrinsic distance × bandwidth limitation of electronic communications links. In other application domains, typically, photonic links are utilized once these electronic limitations have been encountered. Photonic link standards of many kinds have been developed to support such demands in the past. These standards represent a historical context for a silicon microphotonics roadmap—and yet they may impede its development. A roadmap is starting to emerge focused not on how silicon microphotonics can implement existing standards, but rather on how silicon microphotonics supports the migration of network bandwidth in an important way.

To provide a truly compelling solution, silicon microphotonics will likely need to achieve a high degree of monolithic integration with at most a small degree of hybrid integration, (e.g. laser sources) in order to offer low cost and increased functionality. This will probably involve new photonic materials, (e.g. Ge, BaTiO₃, SiON, and so on) near the process back-end. Although this adds manufacturing complexity, this trend is also occurring in advanced CMOS to allow Moore's Law scaling and new functionality, such as high-k gate dielectrics and MRAM's.