Information processing requires interconnects to carry information from one place to another. Optical interconnects between electronics systems have attracted significant attention and development for a number of years because optical links have demonstrated potential advantages for high-speed, low-power, and interference immunity. With increasing system speed and greater bandwidth requirements, the distance over which optical communication is useful has continually decreased to chip-to-chip and on-chip levels. Monolithic integration of photonics and electronics will significantly reduce the cost of optical components and further combine the functionalities of chips on the same or different boards or systems. Modulators are one of the fundamental building blocks for optical interconnects.

Information processing requires interconnects to carry information from one place to another. Optical interconnects between electronics systems have attracted significant attention and development for a number of years because optical links have demonstrated potential advantages for high-speed, low-power, and interference immunity. With increasing system speed and greater bandwidth requirements, the distance over which optical communication is useful has continually decreased to chip-to-chip and on-chip levels. Monolithic integration of photonics and electronics will significantly reduce the cost of optical components and further combine the functionalities of chips on the same or different boards or systems. Modulators are one of the fundamental building blocks for optical interconnects. Previous work demonstrated modulators based upon the quantum confined Stark effect (QCSE) in SiGe p-i-n devices with strained Ge/SiGe multi-quantum-well (MQW) structures in the i region. While the previous work demonstrated the effect, it did not examine the high-speed aspects of the device, which is the focus of this dissertation. High-speed modulation and low driving voltage are the keys for the device's practical use. At lower optical intensity operation, the ultimate limitation in speed will be the RC time constant of the device itself. At high optical intensity, the large number of photo generated carriers in the MQW region will limit the performance of the device through photo carrier related voltage drop and exciton saturation. In previous work, the devices consist of MQWs configured as p-i-n diodes. The electric field induced absorption change by QCSE modulates the optical transmission of the device. The focus of this thesis is the optimization of MQW material deposition, minimization of the parasitic capacitance of the probe pads for high speed, low voltage and high contrast ratio operation. The design, fabrication and high-speed characterization of devices of different sizes, with different bias voltages are presented. The device fabrication is based on processes for standard silicon electronics and is suitable for mass-production. This research will enable efficient transceivers to be monolithically integrated with silicon chips for high-speed optical interconnects. We demonstrated a modulator, with an eye diagram of 3.125GHz, a small driving voltage of 2.5V and an f3dB bandwidth greater than 30GHz. Carrier dynamics under ultra-fast laser excitation and high-speed photocurrent response are also investigated.

Optical interconnects have the potential to help create faster, more powerful computers that use far less energy than they currently do. However, to accomplish this goal, key material and device design breakthroughs must first occur. This Ph. D. dissertation focuses on developing the technology for one component of future optical interconnects, the optical modulator. Ge/SiGe quantum wells exhibit the quantum-confined Stark effect, the strongest high-speed electroabsorption modulation mechanism available in a CMOS-compatible material. We begin by examining the ultrafast carrier dynamics of these quantum wells as a way to understand the fundamental limitations to optical modulators which rely on this material. Using a pump-probe experimental setup, we measured the intervalley scattering time of electrons from the direct valley to the indirect L valley in the conduction band of the germanium wells to be ~185 fs. We also measured field screening in these quantum wells and modeled its recovery through diffusive conduction within 120 ps. This improved understanding of Ge/SiGe quantum wells allowed us to design a waveguide-integrated modulator that relies on selective area growth of this material in thick silicon-on-insulator waveguides. Selective area quantum well waveguide modulators offer the potential of high contrast ratios, low operating energies, and low loss. We developed a novel growth substrate fabrication process to enable high quality selective area growth of Ge/SiGe quantum wells with minimal sidewall growth. We then fabricated selective area modulators integrated with SOI waveguides, and present here preliminary results from these devices.

Thanks to the development of silicon VLSI technology over the past several decades, we can now integrate far more transistors onto a single chip than ever before. However, this also imposes more stringent requirements, in terms of bandwidth, density, and power consumption, on the interconnect systems that link transistors. The interconnect system is currently one of the major hurdles for the further advancement of the electronic technology. Optical interconnect is considered a promising solution to overcome the interconnect bottleneck. The quantum-confined Stark effect in Ge/SiGe quantum well system paves the way to realize efficient optical modulation on Si in a fully CMOS compatible fashion. In this dissertation, we investigate the integration of Ge/SiGe quantum well waveguide modulators with silicon-on-insulator waveguides. For the first time, we demonstrate the selective epitaxial growth of Ge/SiGe quantum well structures on patterned Si substrates. The selective epitaxy exhibits perfect selectivity and minimal pattern sensitivity. Compared to their counterparts made using bulk epitaxy, the p-i-n diodes from selective epitaxy demonstrate very low reverse leakage current and high reverse breakdown voltage. Strong quantum-confined Stark effect (QCSE) is, for the first time, demonstrated in this material system in the telecommunication C-band at room temperature. A 3 dB optical modulation bandwidth of 2.8 THz is measured, covering more than half of the C-band. We propose, analyze, and experimentally demonstrate a novel approach to realize butt coupling between a SOI waveguide and a selectively grown Ge/SiGe quantum well waveguide modulator using a thin dielectric spacer. Through numerical simulation, we show that the insertion loss penalty for a thin 20 nm thick spacer can be as low as 0.13 dB. Such a quantum well waveguide modulator with a footprint of 8 [Mu]m2 has also been fabricated, demonstrating 3.2 dB modulation contrast with merely 1V swing at a speed of 16 Gpbs.

Today's computer systems are constrained by the high power consumption and limited bandwidth of inter- and intra-chip electrical interconnections. Optical links could alleviate these problems, provided that the optical and electronic elements are tightly integrated. Most present optical modulators use materials systems that are incompatible with CMOS device fabrication, or rely on weak electrooptic effects that are difficult to utilize for vertical incidence devices. The extremely high communications bandwidth demands of future silicon chips may ultimately require massively parallel free-space optical links based on array integration of such vertical incidence modulators. We have investigated the suitability of surface-normal asymmetric Fabry-Perot electroabsorption modulators for short-distance optical interconnections between silicon chips. These modulators should be made as small as possible to minimize device capacitance; however, size-dependent optical properties impose constraints on the dimensions. We have thus performed simulations that demonstrate how the optical performance of the modulators depends on both the spot size of the incident beam and the dimensions of the device. We also discuss the tolerance to nonidealities such as surface roughness and beam misalignment. The particular modulators considered here are structures based upon the quantum-confined Stark effect in Ge/SiGe quantum wells. We present device designs that have predicted extinction ratios greater than 7 dB and switching energies as low as 10 fF/bit, which suggests that these CMOS-compatible devices can enable high interconnect bandwidths without the need for wavelength division multiplexing. Next, we present experimental results from these Ge/SiGe asymmetric Fabry-Perot modulators. Several approaches were investigated for forming resonant cavities using high-index-contrast Bragg mirrors around the Ge/SiGe quantum well active regions. These include fabrication on double-silicon-on-insulator reflecting substrates, a layer transfer and etch-back process using anodic bonding, and alkaline etching the backside of the Si substrate to leave suspended SiGe membranes. We present results from each of these modulator structures. The best performance is achieved from the SiGe membrane modulators, which are the first surface-normal resonant-cavity reflection modulators fabricated entirely on standard silicon substrates. Electroabsorption and electrorefraction both contribute to the reflectance modulation. The devices exhibit greater than 10 dB extinction ratio with low insertion loss of 1.3 dB. High-speed modulation with a 3 dB bandwidth of 4 GHz is demonstrated. The moderate-Q cavity (Q~600) yields an operating bandwidth of more than 1 nm and permits operation without active thermal stabilization.

This book is volume III of a series of books on silicon photonics. It reports on the development of fully integrated systems where many different photonics component are integrated together to build complex circuits. This is the demonstration of the fully potentiality of silicon photonics. It contains a number of chapters written by engineers and scientists of the main companies, research centers and universities active in the field. It can be of use for all those persons interested to know the potentialities and the recent applications of silicon photonics both in microelectronics, telecommunication and consumer electronics market.

"Silicon photonic has provided an opportunity to enhance future processor speed by replacing copper interconnects with an on chip optical network. Although photonics are supposed to be efficient in terms of power consumption, speed, and bandwidth, the existing silicon photonic technologies involve problems limiting their efficiency. Examples of limitations to efficiency are transmission loss, coupling loss, modulation speed limited by electro-optical effect, large amount of energy required for thermal control of devices, and the bandwidth limit of existing optical routers. The objective of this dissertation is to investigate novel materials and methods to enhance the efficiency of silicon photonic devices. The first part of this dissertation covers the background, theory and design of on chip optical interconnects, specifically silicon photonic interconnects. The second part describes the work done to build a 300mm silicon photonic library, including its process flow, comprised of basic elements like electro-optical modulators, germanium detectors, Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) interconnects, and a high efficiency grating coupler. The third part shows the works done to increase the efficiency of silicon photonic modulators, unitizing the X(3) nonlinear effect of silicon nanocrystals to make X(2) electro-optical modulators on silicon, and increasing the efficiency of thermal control by incorporating micro-oven structures in electro-optical modulators. The fourth part introduces work done on dynamic optical interconnects including a broadband optical router, single photon level adiabatic wavelength conversion, and optical signal delay. The final part summarizes the work and talks about future development."--Abstract.