Abstract
When silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), defined for transmitting and receiving optical data, are successfully monolithic-integrated into major silicon electronic chips as chip-level optical I/Os (inputs/outputs), it will bring innovative changes in data computing and communications. Here, we propose new photonic integration scheme, a single-chip optical transceiver based on a monolithic-integrated vertical photonic I/O device set including light source on bulk-silicon. This scheme can solve the major issues which impede practical implementation of silicon-based chip-level optical interconnects. We demonstrated a prototype of a single-chip photonic transceiver with monolithic-integrated vertical-illumination type Ge-on-Si photodetectors and VCSELs-on-Si on the same bulk-silicon substrate operating up to 50 Gb/s and 20 Gb/s, respectively. The prototype realized 20 Gb/s low-power chip-level optical interconnects for λ ~ 850 nm between fabricated chips. This approach can have a significant impact on practical electronic-photonic integration in high performance computers (HPC), cpu-memory interface, hybrid memory cube, and LAN, SAN, data center and network applications.
Highlights
When silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), defined for transmitting and receiving optical data, are successfully monolithic-integrated into major silicon electronic chips as chip-level optical I/Os, it will bring innovative changes in data computing and communications
A single-chip photonic transceiver is comprised of monolithic-integrated vertical-illumination type Ge-on-Si photodetectors (Ge V-PDs) and direct-modulation light sources, vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers on a bulk silicon substrate (VCSELs-on-Si)
The integration of Ge V-PDs is based on complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible process on a bulk-Si wafer, and that of VCSELs-on-Si is based on the transplanted epitaxial film and the device fabrication on the same bulk Si wafer as the Ge V-PDs
Summary
When silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs), defined for transmitting and receiving optical data, are successfully monolithic-integrated into major silicon electronic chips as chip-level optical I/Os (inputs/outputs), it will bring innovative changes in data computing and communications. We propose new photonic integration scheme, a single-chip optical transceiver based on a monolithicintegrated vertical photonic I/O device set including light source on bulk-silicon This scheme can solve the major issues which impede practical implementation of silicon-based chip-level optical interconnects. Due to the lack of a practical light source based on Group IV elements, flip chip-bonded or packaged lasers based on III–V semiconductor devices are being used as external light sources, to feed silicon modulators on SOI-based platforms to complete a photonic transmitter. This does not accomplish monolithic integration as well as a chip-level complete photonic I/O set. The exception may be the reported silicon hybrid lasers integrated on SOI wafers, which have an active region based on III–V materials[41,42,43,44,45,46]
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