Abstract:
Integrating silicon photonics platforms with advanced electronics leverages transistor performance, process fidelity and package integration to enable a new class of systems-on-a-chip. This silicon photonics technology can be used for a variety of applications ranging from computing and communications to sensing and imaging. Monolithic silicon photonics is a promising solution to meet the energy efficiency, sensitivity, and cost requirements of these applications.
In this review paper, we take a comprehensive view of the performance of the silicon-photonic technologies developed to date for photonic interconnect applications. We also present the latest performance results of our “zero-change” silicon photonics platforms in 45 nm and 32 nm SOI CMOS. The results indicate that the 45 nm and 32 nm processes provide a “sweet-spot” for adding photonic capabilities and enhancing integrated system applications beyond the Moore-scaling. At the same time, these processes are able to offload major communication tasks from more deeply-scaled compute and memory chips without complicated 3D integration approaches.
Authors:
Vladimir Stojanovic, Rajeev J. Ram, Milos Popovic, Sen Lin, Sajjad Moazeni, Mark Wade, Chen Sun, Luca Alloatti, Amir Atabaki, Fabio Pavanello, Nandish Mehta, and Pavan Bhargava
Published In: OSA Publishing
