High Speed AttoJoule/Bit Passive and Active Nanophotonic Devices for Computing and Optical Interconnects
Abstract
Optoelectronic interconnects and optical logic gates provide key solutions to drastically reduce the power to modulate (e-to-o conversion), processing, transport, and demodulate (o-to-e) high speed signals with power consumption down to attojoule/bit (AJ/B) level. In this program, the team proposes a myriad of ultra-low power nanooptoelectronic devices for intra- and inter-chip optical interconnects and computing. A vertical cavity surface emitting nano-lasers is proposed with high injection current confinement and extremely high quantum efficiency that can provide 1 to 2 orders magnitude power saving to 100 Gbit/sec. A modified uni-traveling carrier (MUTC) photo receiver is also proposed to solely utilize highly mobile electrons to provide o-to-e conversion with near-to-unity quantum efficiency at zero bias that can be integrated on a silicon photonics platform. An innovative modulator using the combination of the slow light effect on Si photonic crystal and the plasmonic free carrier absorption effect drastically reduces the device size and modulation efficiency to <100 AttoJoule/Bit level at above 25 Gbit/sec, which is at least one order of magnitude less than the state-of-the art devices. To provide wavelength routing in a WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) based on-chip network, a low power nxn wavelength router is proposed using 2D photonic crystal based slow light effect with great power saving capability. To further solve the problem in huge power consumption of the state-of the art data centers and cloud computing, the research team proposes to take advantage of the optical computing and design an extreme adder architecture suitable for ultra-high bit count (such as 256, 512, 1024-bit). The proposed n-bit full adder is fully implementable on a silicon platform using guided wave optics.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Feb 06, 2017
- Source ID
- FA95501710071
Entities
People
- Ray Chen
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- United States Air Force
- University of Texas at Austin