Monolithic silicon-photonic platforms in state-of-the-art CMOS SOI processes [Invited]

TLDR

Integrating photonics with advanced electronics leverages transistor performance, process fidelity, and package integration to enable new systems‑on‑chip for computing, communications, sensing, and imaging, and monolithic silicon photonics promises to meet the energy‑efficiency, sensitivity, and cost requirements of these applications. This review comprehensively examines the performance of silicon‑photonics technologies for photonic interconnects. The authors present results from zero‑change silicon‑photonics platforms fabricated in 45 nm and 32 nm SOI CMOS processes. The 45 nm and 32 nm processes offer a sweet spot for adding photonic capability, enhancing integrated system applications beyond Moore scaling, and offloading major communication tasks from deeply scaled compute and memory chips without complex 3D integration.

Abstract

Integrating photonics with advanced electronics leverages transistor performance, process fidelity and package integration, to enable a new class of systems-on-a-chip for a variety of applications ranging from computing and communications to sensing and imaging. Monolithic silicon photonics is a promising solution to meet the energy efficiency, sensitivity, and cost requirements of these applications. In this review paper, we take a comprehensive view of the performance of the silicon-photonic technologies developed to date for photonic interconnect applications. We also present the latest performance and results of our "zero-change" silicon photonics platforms in 45 nm and 32 nm SOI CMOS. The results indicate that the 45 nm and 32 nm processes provide a "sweet-spot" for adding photonic capability and enhancing integrated system applications beyond the Moore-scaling, while being able to offload major communication tasks from more deeply-scaled compute and memory chips without complicated 3D integration approaches.