Michael T. Morse

Development of CMOS-Compatible Integrated Silicon Photonics Devices

This paper surveys technical challenges involved in designing and manufacturing integrated optoelectronic devices in a high-volume complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) microelectronic fabrication facility. The paper begins by introducing the motivations for building these devices in silicon. We discuss the advantages and challenges of both hybrid and monolithic strategies for optoelectronic integration. We then discuss the issues involved in building the devices in a standard CMOS facility, including specific technical examples. These include low-loss waveguides (WGs) for Raman lasers, fast silicon modulators, SiGe heterostructures for infrared photodetection, silicon-oxynitride (SiON) devices on silicon-on-insulator (SOI), silicon optical bench (SiOB) technology, and waveguide tapers. We conclude with a discussion and recommendations for future work in silicon photonics

Progress toward competitive Ge/Si photodetectors

Research and development on silicon-based optoelectronic devices is increasing as the need for integrated optical devices is becoming more apparent. One component which has seen rapid performance improvement over the last five years has been a Ge-on-Si photodetector which can operate between 850 and 1600 nm with high quantum efficiencies and bandwidths. We have reported on three types of these detectors; normal incident illuminated p-i-n detectors, waveguide p-i-n detectors, and avalanche photodetectors (APDs). The former has achieved -14.5 dBm sensitivity at 10 Gb/s and 850 nm, which is comparable to similarly commercially packaged GaAs devices. Waveguide photodetectors have achieved bandwidths of approximately 30 GHz at 1550 nm with internal quantum efficiencies of 90%. Normal incident avalanche photodetectors operating at 1310 nm have achieved a primary responsivity of 0.54 A/W with a 3-dB bandwidth of 9GHz at a gain of 17.

Performance and Reliability of SiGe Photodetectors

The raw performance of normal incidence Ge on Si detectors has been found to be close to that of GaAs devices in optical properties at 850nm. In addition the leakage current is nearing that needed for many applications. Further receiver data that quantifies this is presented at the talk