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Teaching silicon new tricks

Nature Photonics volume 1, pages 193–195 (2007)Cite this article

Arguably the most important element for the electronics industry, silicon is now being given a new lease of life in the world of photonics.

Empowering silicon with optical functions, such as the ability to emit, guide and modulate light, could be the key to creating short-distance ultrafast optical interconnects that overcome one of the most formidable hurdles in scaling the speed of computing1. An ultimate aim is the realization of silicon chips that communicate internally, or with other chips, using photons and optical waveguides and thus overcome the bandwidth limitations imposed by metallic interconnects. Yet another opportunity lies in optical sensors with on-chip communication circuitry that can form nodes of intelligent sensor networks used for environmental and health monitoring.

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Figure 1: Two-photon absorption generates free carriers that in turn cause a significant amount of absorption.
Figure 2: Owing to the rapid increase in transistor count, in accordance with Moore's Law, the power density on a silicon chip has already exceeded 100 W cm−2.
Figure 3: A silicon image amplifier as described in ref. 2.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank DARPA for supporting his work on silicon photonics. He is also indebted to Sasan Fathpour and Prakash Koonath for their review of the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Bahram Jalali is at the University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095-1594, USA. Jalali@ucla.edu,

    Bahram Jalali

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Jalali, B. Teaching silicon new tricks. Nature Photon 1, 193–195 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2007.35

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