SC267 Silicon Microphotonics: Technology Elements and the Roadmap to Implementation

Sunday, March 22, 2009
1:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m.
Lionel Kimerling; MIT, USA
Level: Advanced Beginner (basic understanding of topic is necessary to follow course material)

Course Description

The optical components industry stands at the threshold of a major expansion that will restructure its business processes and sustain its profitability for the next three decades. This growth will establish a cost effective platform for the partitioning of electronic and photonic functionality to extend the processing power of integrated circuits and the performance of optical communications networks. The traditional dimensional shrink approach to the scaling of microprocessor technology is encountering barriers in materials and power dissipation that dictate more distributed architectures. Before 2015 the performance requirements for this short link interconnection will cross the 10Mb/s.km threshold that dictates optical carrier utilization. This business direction will ignite a major change in leadership of the industry from information transmission (telecom) to information processing (computing, imaging); and it will open significant new markets with high volume applications. Silicon Microphotonics is a platform for the large scale integration of CMOS electronics with photonic components.

This course will evaluate the most promising silicon optical components and the path to electronic-photonic integration. The subjects will be presented in two parts: 1) Context: a review of the recently released Communications Technology Roadmap by the Industry Consortium of the MIT Microphotonics Center; and 2) Technology: case studies in High Index Contrast design for silicon-based waveguide, filter, photodetector, modulator and laser devices. The course objective is presentation of an overview of the silicon microphotonic platform drivers and barriers in design, fabrication, packaging and test.

Benefits and Learning Objectives

This course should enable you to:

  • Identify trends in the optical components industry.
  • Explain the power of a standard platform.
  • Discuss the benefits of electronic-photonic integration.
  • Evaluate the latest silicon photonic devices.
  • Summarize the findings of the Communications Technology Roadmap.

Intended Audience

This course is for executives and technologists in the optical components industry to include planners, engineers and scientists participating in the optical components technology supply chain.

Biography

Lionel Kimerling is the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. He was head of materials physics research at Bell Labs until 1990, when he joined MIT. He is currently director of the MIT Materials Processing Center and its affiliate, the MIT Microphotonics Center, which he co-founded with 30 faculty members in 1997. Among his industry responsibilities were long term reliability of semiconductor lasers, development of the first 1MB DRAM chip and defect diagnostics and control for silicon IC manufacturing. His group’s research has focused on silicon microphotonics, environmentally benign IC manufacturing and solar electricity.