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Last Hurdle to Optics on a Chip?
Research team marries light-emitting properties of indium phosphide with silicon's light-routing capabilities
By Lee Nelson
As miniaturization continues scaling down to nanometer proportions, silicon-based microelectronics—the leading technology for more than four decades—soon will have exhausted its fundamental limit.
Microphotonics (and nanophotonics) not only would extend silicon's utility, it could foreshadow monumental integration of optics into silicon-based chips; thereby extending the technology's usefulness as well as effecting standalone miniature subsystems.
A major limitation to realizing optics-on-a-chip has been the lack of a practical silicon-based light source. Material of choice must be luminescent at wavelengths of interest and be able to amplify light. Attempting to make light-emitting devices or lasers, researchers have explored materials based on silicon defect-engineering, SiO2 (silicon dioxide) nanocrystals, erbium-doped Si and SiO2, SiGe and SiGeC (silicon-germanium) alloys.
Late last year, researchers at Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and the University of California (UCSB, Santa Barbara) built a laser-integrated circuit (IC). The invention addressed one of the last remaining hurdles to high bandwidth silicon microphotonics.
On a single IC, the team married the light-emitting properties of InP (indium phosphide) with silicon's light-routing capabilities.
