Electro-optics and Nanophotonics


Electronics & Photonics

Project Description

Advanced electro-optics and nanophotonics are enabling technologies for applications in communications, computing, manufacturing, healthcare, and energy. Progress in this field has the potential to generate new knowledge, promote economic growth, create new industries, and provide technologies for new applications.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has created a huge and growing demand for bandwidths on datacenters that, as a consequence, has resulted in sustained growth in electrical energy consumption. Even with the improved overall efficiency of electronic processors following Moore’s law, a more transformative improvement is required to increase bandwidth and reduce power consumption without compromising the growing data rates in data centers and metro communication systems. A consensus to achieve these future datacenter performance requirements is replacing metal interconnects by photonic link technologies due to its high bandwidth and low-power consumption. Indeed, there is a growing demand in cost-effective, complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible photonic integrated circuits (PIC) for transmission and optical circuit switching with emphasis on datacenter and metro applications. This proposed project focuses on one of the key components for PICs, an optical modulator for data modulation/switching with very high speed. Specifically, this project will design, fabricate and characterize a CMOS compatible Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulator based on free carriers plasma dispersion effects. Since the free carriers’ effect is driven by capacity, it will lead to lower power consumption. Furthermore, since MZ configuration is non-resonant, it will allow the modulation of information on optical carriers in a wide WDM frequency grid.

Problem to be solved: High speed optical modulators, especially intensity modulators, are critical to the ongoing integration of optical components into a PIC. Due to their large nonlinear optical coefficients, materials such as GaAs, InP and LiNbO3 were among the first candidates considered for the realization of high speed devices. However, it has long been considered advantageous to realize optical modulation with higher bandwidths with lower power consumption in a CMOS-compatible material platform. In this context, ongoing research efforts will be focused on the design, fabrication and testing of high-speed modulators fabricated in silicon using CMOS. The results from this project will lead to more efficient optical modulators.

Team Members

  • Amr Alasaad
  • Felipe Vallini
  • Shaya Fainman

List of Publications