Chapter 10 - New Devices for Optoelectronics: Smart Pixels

Abstract

It is noted that smart pixel technology is continually making significant progress. This progress includes improvements to individual device performance, improvements to circuit performance, extensions to larger arrays, and applications to new areas. Vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) technology significantly produces considerable improvements in both individual device performance and array uniformity and performance. It is observed that the smart pixel community is expanding to other non-traditional smart pixel applications too, including smart imaging systems and applications based on digital signal processing. These two mutually supporting trends along with emerging fields of Smart Photonics, Optoelectronic-VLSI, and Electronic- Enhanced Optics have led to progress in smart-pixel technology. This chapter illustrates the current state-of-the-art in devices, applications, and demonstrations. The concept of the smart pixel is to integrate both electronic processing and individual optical devices on a common chip in order to take advantage of the complexity of electronic processing circuits and the speed of optical devices. Arrays of these smart pixels can then bring the advantage of parallelism. There are a number of different approaches to smart pixels, which generally differ in the way in which the electronic and optical devices are integrated. The three most common approaches include monolithic integration, direct epitaxy, and hybrid integration.