Silicon Photonic Microring Links for High-Bandwidth-Density, Low-Power Chip I/O

Ophir, Noam; Mineo, C.; Mountain, David J.; Bergman, Keren

doi:10.1109/mm.2013.1

Cited by 66 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Commercially implemented microring-based optical networks will likely be application-tailored through the optimization of such microring characteristics as optical insertion loss, crosstalk, footprint, modulation-bandwidth, -linearity, and -depth [19][20][21][22]. However, superseding these parameters in importance is the issue of thermal susceptibility.…”

Section: Silicon Microring Resonator Based Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Currently, in commercial telecommunications links, laser wavelengths are kept locked to a fixed wavelength grid (the ITU standard). However, for the future shortreach interconnects that silicon-photonic devices are envisioned to populate, a different class of low-power laser sources will be required [19,[28][29][30]. For athermal solutions, it will be required that laser wavelengths are fixed to the resonant wavelengths of the microring resonators, and that the stability of the laser wavelength can be ensured throughout operation of the optical link.…”

Section: Thermal Effects On Microring Resonator Based Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Resolving the thermal challenges for silicon microring resonator devices

2014

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Silicon microring resonators have been hailed for their potential use in next-generation optical interconnects. However, the functionality of silicon microring based devices suffer from susceptibility to thermal fluctuations that is often overlooked in their demonstrated results, but must be resolved for their future implementation in microelectronic applications. We survey the emerging efforts that have been put forth to resolve these thermal susceptibilities and provide a comprehensive discussion of their advantages and disadvantages.Keywords: integrated photonics; microring resonators; optical interconnects; silicon photonics. The growing bandwidth needs within data applications have motivated the replacement of traditionally electronic links with optical links for information networks as diverse as data centers, supercomputers, and fiber-optic access networks [1,2]. Applications such as these stress the traditional portfolio of optical components, rebalancing the emphasis from expensive high-performance components towards low-cost high-volume components that can be closely integrated with electronics. With these considerations in mind, the silicon photonics platform has received wide attention for its ability to deliver the necessary bandwidth required at an economy-of-scale that will be enabled by its compatibility with CMOS fabrication processes [3].Within the silicon photonic platform, traditional optical components such as low-loss waveguides [4], lowloss waveguide crossings [5], high-speed mach-zhender modulators (MZM) [6], arrayed waveguide-gratings [7], and efficient photodetectors [8,9] have been demonstrated. Leveraging the high index contrast between silicon and silicon-on-insulator, the aforementioned components have been shown with much smaller footprints than their counterparts in more conventional optical platforms. For active devices, these smaller footprints directly translate to higher energy-efficiencies.In addition to providing these improvements in footprint and energy-efficiency for traditional devices, the high-index contrast present in the silicon photonic platform enables the effective use of microring-based devices. A microring is a traveling wave resonator consisting of a ring structure side-coupled to a bus waveguide. While they have also been demonstrated in other material platforms, the high-index contrast of silicon and silicon-oninsulator has allowed them to be manifested as small as 1.5 µm in radius [10], and when used in conjunction with the free-carrier dispersion effect [11], well into Ghz-rate bandwidth. Figure 1A illustrates the optical resonance of the microring and its shift with applied electrical bias [12]. In their most basic capacity they can serve as effective filters [13], switches [14,15], and modulators [16,17]. Additionally, microrings can be cascaded along the same waveguide bus, with each microring being offset to provide functionality for a specific wavelength. In this manner, the microring lends itself naturally for wavelength-divisionmultiplexed ...

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Section: Silicon Microring Resonator Based Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Thermal Effects On Microring Resonator Based Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resolving the thermal challenges for silicon microring resonator devices

2014

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“…In most of the link power efficiency interconnect system analysis, single order filters are considered [22]. Second order filters are taken into account [6] by cascading two single ring filters, with power consumptions based on adding contribution of each ring with a total of 2.8 mW/channel, following [22] rather than [8]. Inter-ring tuning power consumption and some feedback can be avoided with the configuration proposed in this paper, meaning more than 40% efficiency improvement.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In photonic interconnects designs for computing systems, single channel rates typically range from 4 Gbs to 25 Gbs [3][4][5][6]. A 20 channels manufactured filter bank, including data of the power needed to tune the different channels and the thermal crosstalk between rings can be seen in [8], where each second-order filter has a channel bandwidth of 20 GHz.…”

Section: Circuit Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From those data, Miller [2] stimates that new systems should be able to consume energies below 170fJ/bit in 2022, for clock processor speeds of 67.5 GHz (offchip). The power consumption of recent silicon WDM photonic interconnect links [3][4][5][6], shows that there is still space for improvement. Most of those designs rely on small footprint and high power efficiency microring resonators [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Low power consumption silicon photonics tuning filters based on compound microring resonators

2013

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Scalable integrated optics platforms based on silicon-on-insulator allow to develop optics and electronics functions on the same chip. Developments in this area are fostered by its potential as an I/O technology that can meet the throughputs demand of future many-core processors. Most of the optical interconnect designs rely on small footprint and high power efficiency microring resonators. They are used to filter out individual channels from a shared bus guide. Second-order microring filters enable denser channel packing by having sharper pass-band to stop-band slopes. Taking advantage of using a single physical ring with clockwise and counter-clockwise propagation, we implement second order filters with lower tuning energy consumption as being more resilient to some fabrication errors. Cascade ability, remote stabilization potential, energy efficiency along with simple design equations on coupling coefficients are described. We design second-order filters with FWHM from 45 GHz to 20 GHz, crosstalk between channels from -40 dB to -20 dB for different channel spacing at a specific FSR, with energy efficiencies of single ring configurations and compatible with silicon-on-insulator (SOI) state of the art platforms.

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