Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2010
Volume 55, Number 2
Monday–Friday, March 15–19, 2010; Portland, Oregon
Session A5: Silicon Photonics |
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Sponsoring Units: FIAP Chair: David Lockwood, National Research Council Canada Room: Portland Ballroom 256 |
Monday, March 15, 2010 8:00AM - 8:36AM |
A5.00001: Physical Requirements and Opportunities for Dense Optical Interconnects to Chips Invited Speaker: Electrical interconnects are running into severe problems, especially in density and energy dissipation. Such interconnect problems exist at all levels in electronic systems, even down to interconnects to and on chips. Optics can fundamentally avoid these problems but the technological requirements on devices are challenging [1]. As a baseline, optical devices would have to operate as fast as the electronics (e.g., on-chip clock rates will rise to 14 GHz according to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors), and with no more energy. The energy per bit for electrical off-chip interconnects, such as on backplanes, is a few pJ/bit in current research, and on-chip global interconnects are 1 pJ/bit or lower, with possibilities for 100's of fJ/bit. Hence research targets for optics should be in the 100 fJ/bit range so that there is sufficient benefit. The device energy for optical output (e.g., for a laser or a modulator) should be 10's of fJ/bit since energy is required also for driver and receiver circuits and for clocking. Received energies would then be fJ's given reasonable optical losses. With photodetector capacitance of fF's the absorbed optical energy is enough to generate photodetector voltage swings of 1 V, thus eliminating the receiver voltage amplifiers and their power dissipation. Such device targets are aggressive but not unphysical, and may require combinations of our best optical nanotechnologies, including nanoresonators, quantum wells and/or dots, and nanometallic and/or plasmonic field enhancements. Any and all such devices and technologies must be integrable with silicon CMOS, not only for cost and manufacturability, but also to obtain the necessary low device capacitances. Specific prospects in nanometallic enhanced detectors and in germanium quantum wells on silicon will also be discussed.\\[4pt] [1] D. A. B. Miller, ``Device Requirements for Optical Interconnects to Silicon Chips,'' Proc. IEEE 97, 1166 - 1185 (2009) [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 15, 2010 8:36AM - 9:12AM |
A5.00002: Silicon Organic Hybrid: A platform for future high-speed silicon photonics Invited Speaker: |
Monday, March 15, 2010 9:12AM - 9:48AM |
A5.00003: Silicon-Germanium Nanostructures for Light Emitters and On-Chip Optical Interconnects Invited Speaker: The basic elements of the modern Si photonic system are photodetectors, waveguides, modulators and light-emitters. In order to be commercially valuable, the light emitters should be efficient, fast, operational at room temperature and, perhaps most importantly, be compatible with the ``main stream'' CMOS technology. Another important requirement is in the emission wavelength, which should match the optical waveguide low-loss spectral region, i.e., 1.3-1.6 $\mu$m. Among other approaches, epitaxially-grown Si/SiGe quantum wells and quantum dot/quantum well complexes produce efficient photoluminescence (PL) and electroluminescence (EL) in the required spectral range. Until recently, the major roadblocks for practical applications of these devices were strong thermal quenching of the luminescence quantum efficiency and a long carrier radiative lifetime. In this presentation, the latest progress in the understanding of physics of carrier recombination in Si/SiGe nanostructures is reviewed, and a route toward CMOS compatible light emitters for on-chip optical interconnects is proposed. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 15, 2010 9:48AM - 10:24AM |
A5.00004: Photonic Integrated Circuits Based on Plasmonics and Quantum Dot Materials: Properties, Compensation of Optical Losses and Applications Invited Speaker: Nanophotonics and plasmonics have received much attention recently, fuelled by a general interest in nanotechnology but also by rapid advances in integrated photonics, mainly brought about by using silicon, with larger refractive index difference than previously employed [L. Thylen et al, J. Zhejiang Univ. SCIENCE 2006 7(12)]. Plasmonics offers a possibility for devices with field sizes much smaller than the wavelength of light in aa host medium. But the tighter the field confinement, the greater are generally the optical losses, determined by the imaginary part of epsilon. This remains a critical issue. Dissipative losses impede the ubiquitous usefulness of nanophotonics light wave circuits. Recently, optical gain in quantum dots for reducing or compensate losses was analyzed [A Bratkovsky et al, Applied Physics Letters 93, 193106 (2008)]. However, the concomitant effects of the high (but not unreachable) gain required for this are \textit{high }power\textit{ dissipation} and \textit{signal to noise ratio degradation}. Power dissipation is primarily due to the losses of the metal structures and Auger recombination in the quantum dots. A general and square chip size independent expression for the information capacity of a lossless (by amplification) plasmonic chip is given, using the allowed values for integrated electronics power dissipation. In conclusion, with amplification and with current understanding, it appears possible to sizewise come close to CMOS dimensions for isolated integrated photonic devices, but not in integration density. This is due to power dissipation in currently employed negative epsilon materials. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, March 15, 2010 10:24AM - 11:00AM |
A5.00005: Compacting high-end computing systems with silicon photonic interconnects Invited Speaker: The talk will present a design of a microsystem that utilizes silicon photonic interconnects to enable a highly compact supercomputer-scale system. It will describe and justify single node and multimode systems interconnected with wavelength-routed optical links, and will analyze their benefits versus electrically connected systems. [Preview Abstract] |
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