Silicon Photonic Platforms and Systems for High-speed Communications

Data communication is a critical component of modern technology in our society. There is an increasing reliance on information being at our fingers tips and we expect a low-latency, high-bandwidth connection to deliver entertainment or enhanced productivity. In order to serve this demand, communications devices are being pressed for smaller form factors, higher data throughput, lower power consumption and lower cost. Similar demands exist in a number of applications including metro/long-haul telecommunications, shorter datacenter links and supercomputing. Silicon photonics promises to be a technology that will solve some of the difficulties with improving communication devices. Building photonics in silicon allows for reuse of the same fabrication technology that is used by the CMOS electronics industry, potentially allowing for large volumes, high yields and low costs. Part I of this thesis details the design of components needed in a high-speed silicon photonic platform to meet the current challenges for high-speed communications. The author’s work in modeling photodetectors resulted in improving photodetector bandwidth from 30 GHz to 67 GHz, the fastest reported at the time of publication. Details regarding the optimization and test of modulators are also presented with the first-reported 50 Gbps modulator at 1310-nm. A large scale parallel channel demonstration of high-speed silicon photonics is then presented showing the potential scalability for silicon photonics systems. A full transceiver requires a number of components other than the photodetector and modulator that are the core active pieces of a silicon photonics platform. Part II includes work on the design and test of silicon photonic components providing functionality beyond the photodetector and modulator. A novel design integrating Metal-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MESFETs) into a silicon photonics platform without process change is shown. This integration enables enhanced control functionality with minimal overhead. The critical final piece for a silicon photonics platform, adding a light source, is demonstrated along with performance results of the resulting tunable, extended C-band laser. In Part III, previous work on an enhanced silicon photonics platform with complementary components is used to build a high-speed integrated coherent link and then tested with a silicon photonics-based tunable laser. The transceiver was shown to operate at 34 Gbaud dual-polarization 16-QAM for a total of 272 Gbps over a single channel. This was the first published demonstration of an integrated coherent where all of the optics were built in a silicon photonics platform

Three-Dimensional Phase Step Profilometry With A Multicore Optical Fiber

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of using phase stepping and a multicore optical fiber to calculate an object\u27s depth profile. An interference pattern is projected by an optical fiber onto the object. The distorted interference pattern containing the object information is captured by a CCD camera and processed using a phase step interferometry method. The phase step method is less computationally intensive compared to two-dimensional Fourier transform profilometry and provides more accuracy when measuring objects of high frequency spatial variations. (C) 2012 Optical Society of Americ

A CMOS-compatible silicon photonic platform for high-speed integrated opto-electronics

We have developed a CMOS-compatible Silicon-on-Insulator photonic platform featuring active components such as p- i-n and photoconductive (MIM) Ge-on-Si detectors, p-i-n ring and Mach-Zehnder modulators, and traveling-wave modulators based on a p-n junction driven by an RF transmission line. We have characterized the yield and uniformity of the performance through automated cross-wafer testing, demonstrating that our process is reliable and scalable. The entire platform is capable of more than 40 GB/s data rate. Fabricated at the IME/A-STAR foundry in Singapore, it is available to the worldwide community through OpSIS, a successful multi-project wafer service based at the University of Delaware. After exposing the design, fabrication and performance of the most advanced platform components, we present our newest results obtained after the first public run. These include low loss passives (Y-junctions: 0.28 dB; waveguide crossings: 0.18 dB and cross-talk -41±2 dB; non-uniform grating couplers: 3.2±0.2 dB). All these components were tested across full 8” wafers and exhibited remarkable uniformity. The active devices were improved from the previous design kit to exhibit 3dB bandwidths ranging from 30 GHz (modulators) to 58 GHz (detectors). We also present new packaging services available to OpSIS users: vertical fiber coupling and edge coupling