12 February 2004
Silicon gets photonics friendly
Silicon is the material of choice for electronics, and essentially all integrated circuits are made from it. But since the 1980s, information technology has started trading in a different currency, using the photons that make up light beams rather than the electrons of electrical currents. So researchers are chipping away at the obstacles that prevent the use of silicon in photonics systems. A silicon-based light source is needed and already several groups are working on promising silicon light sources. The next part of the jigsaw is an optical modulator fast enough to bear comparison to those used in electronics. That target gets a little closer this week, with a report from a group based in the San Jose and Jerusalem labs of Intel Corporation. They have developed a silicon optical modulator that operates with a bandwidth of more than 1 GHz, quite an advance on the 20 MHz best previously attainable.
A high-speed silicon optical modulator based
on a metal-oxide-semiconductor capacitor
ANSHENG LIU, RICHARD JONES, LING LIAO, DEAN SAMARA-RUBIO,
DORON RUBIN, ODED COHEN, REMUS NICOLAESCU & MARIO PANICCIA
Nature 427, 615–618 (2004); doi:10.1038/nature02310
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Device physics: The optical age of silicon
GRAHAM T. REED
The silicon chip has been the mainstay of the electronics industry and
it may similarly come to dominate photonics. A key component — a
high-frequency optical modulator — has now been fabricated.
Nature 427, 595–596 (2004); doi:10.1038/427595b
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