Wide temperature range operation of micrometer-scale silicon electro-optic modulators

Manipatruni, Sasikanth; Dokania, Rajeev; Schmidt, Bradley S.; Sherwood-Droz, Nicolás; Poitras, Carl B.; Apsel, Alyssa; Lipson, Michal

doi:10.1364/ol.33.002185

Cited by 99 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 12 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…Running current through these resistive structures generates heat, which can be used to tune the local temperature of the microring resonator. A noted alternative, available for carrier-injection microring modulators, is to adjust the bias current of the diode junction to directly heat the microring resonator [27,49,50]. This technique was used to implement the first control system for thermally stabilizing a microring resonator for data applications [27].…”

Section: Integrated Heatersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This technique was used to implement the first control system for thermally stabilizing a microring resonator for data applications [27]. However, while effective, bias tuning has a limited temperature tuning range [49], and was found to have deleterious effects on the generated optical modulation [27]. The preferred solution is to use an integrated heater to separate the high-speed electrical operation of the microring resonator from its (relatively) low-speed thermal stabilization.…”

Section: Integrated Heatersmentioning

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: Integrated Heatersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Integrated Heatersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resolving the thermal challenges for silicon microring resonator devices

2014

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“…Because the graphene parallel-plate capacitor was much larger than necessary as the area of the optical mode is only ~ 0.5 μm 2 , limiting the area of the graphene capacitor to the optical mode (~ 200 times smaller) would lead to a reduction of two orders of magnitude in the switching energy and RC time constant. As the cavity optical bandwidth is large (~ 600 GHz for a Q value of 300), such graphene-PPC modulators could enable high modulation contrast, exceptionally low energy consumption, and a much broader modulation bandwidth than Si modulators based on free-carrier dispersion [48][49][50].…”

Section: Graphene-cavity High-speed E-o Modulatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Active 2D materials for on-chip nanophotonics and quantum optics

et al. 2017

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Two-dimensional materials have emerged as promising candidates to augment existing optical networks for metrology, sensing, and telecommunication, both in the classical and quantum mechanical regimes. Here, we review the development of several on-chip photonic components ranging from electro-optic modulators, photodetectors, bolometers, and light sources that are essential building blocks for a fully integrated nanophotonic and quantum photonic circuit.

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“…It is, however, not practical for intra-chip optical interconnects due to the significant area and power overhead required for wavelength multiplexing/demultiplexing. For example, the microring based implementation needs resistive thermal bias [10] to stabilize its wavelength, which adds significant amount of static power dissipation [11].…”

Section: Challenges For On-chip Optical Interconnectmentioning

confidence: 99%

An intra-chip free-space optical interconnect

Xue-Jing

GargAlok

CiftciogluBerkehan

et al. 2010

SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News

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Continued device scaling enables microprocessors and other systems-on-chip (SoCs) to increase their performance, functionality, and hence, complexity. Simultaneously, relentless scaling, if uncompensated, degrades the performance and signal integrity of on-chip metal interconnects. These systems have therefore become increasingly communications-limited. The communications-centric nature of future high performance computing devices demands a fundamental change in intra-and inter-chip interconnect technologies.Optical interconnect is a promising long term solution. However, while significant progress in optical signaling has been made in recent years, applying conventional packetswitching interconnect architecture to optical networks require repeated E/O and O/E conversions that significantly diminish the advantages of optical signaling. In this paper, we propose to leverage a suite of newly-developed or emerging devices, circuits, and optics technologies to build a fully distributed interconnect architecture based on free-space optics. With a complexity-effective communication support layer to manage occasional packet collisions, the interconnect avoids packet relay altogether, offers an ultra-low transmission latency and scalable bandwidth, and provides fresh opportunities for coherency substrate designs and optimizations.

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Wide temperature range operation of micrometer-scale silicon electro-optic modulators

Cited by 99 publications

References 12 publications

Resolving the thermal challenges for silicon microring resonator devices

Resolving the thermal challenges for silicon microring resonator devices

Active 2D materials for on-chip nanophotonics and quantum optics

An intra-chip free-space optical interconnect

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