A monolithic bipolar CMOS electronic–plasmonic high-speed transmitter

Abstract

In order to address the challenge of increasing data rates, next generation optical communication networks will require the co-integration of electronics and photonics. Heterogeneous integration of these technologies has shown promise, but will eventually become bandwidth limited. Faster monolithic approaches will, therefore, be needed, but monolithic approaches using complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) electronics and silicon photonics are typically limited by their underlying electronic or photonic technologies. Here, we report a monolithically integrated electro-optical transmitter that can achieve symbol rates beyond 100 GBd. Our approach combines advanced bipolar CMOS with silicon plasmonics, and addresses key challenges in monolithic integration through the co-design of the electronic and plasmonic layers, including thermal design, packaging, and a nonlinear organic electro-optic material. To illustrate the potential of our technology, we develop two modulator conceptsan ultra-compact plasmonic modulator and, alternatively, a silicon-plasmonic modulator with photonic routing -both directly processed onto the bipolar CMOS electronics.

Massively Parallel Arrays of Size‐Controlled Metallic Nanogaps with Gap‐Widths Down to the Sub‐3‐nm Level

“…photocatalysis, [9] surface-enhanced spectroscopy, [10,11] nanolasers, [12] solar cells, [13] and plasmonic circuits. [14] Nanogap devices promise to revolutionize numerous aspects of modern science and technology, but they are currently being held back by the absence of fast, controlled, reliable (high yield), and low-cost methods of fabricating in-plane MNGs with electrode spacings below 10 nm. Typical fabrication methods entail the use of e-beam lithography (EBL), [15][16][17] mechanical break junctions, [5,18,19] electrochemical migration, [20,21] wet chemical methods, [22] atomic layer deposition, [23,24] or focused-ion beam (FIB) milling [25,26] to create the nanogaps (see Table S1, Supporting Information for a comparison of common nanogap fabrication techniques).…”

Nanoscale nonlinear plasmonics in photonic waveguides and circuits

“…(8). The most commonly used electro-optic material is LiNbO 3 [101], and organic electro-optic (OEO) materials have recently been developed and included in dielectric-plasmonic devices [19], for field sensing at GHz and THz frequencies [150] and electro-optic data modulation with extremely low footprints (∼ 2.4 Tb/s/mm 2 [154]).…”

Electronic–photonic convergence for silicon photonics transmitters beyond 100 Gbps on–off keying

“…Electronic-photonic convergence for silicon photonics transmitters beyond 100 Gbps on-off keying K L , 1 The optical modulator is the critical component in systems serving modern information and communication technologies [1], not only in traditional data communication links, but also in microwave photonics or chip-scale computing networks. It is noticeable that several recent outstanding devices, which are based on thin-film lithium niobate [2,3] and electronic plasmonics [4], have demonstrated 100 Gbps on-off keying (OOK) transmission only, by incorporating equalization techniques. Furthermore, all of these devices suffer from concerns over fabrication complexity and productivity yield and are incompatible with standard CMOS processes.…”

“…These preliminary measurements results have already demonstrated comparable bandwidth performance to the reported lithium niobate modulators [2,3], which so far have not been realized with driver integration, which typically results in a significant bandwidth penalty. Furthermore, the power consumption of this work is 4 times lower compared to the electronic-plasmonic modulator [4] that has been integrated with electronics. In all comparative aspects, the proposed all-silicon optical transmitter solution is superior to all previous works in this field and illustrates great potential for next-generation optical communication links at 100 Gbaud and beyond.…”