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> Integrated Optical ComponentsIntegrated Optical Components
Contact: Laurent Fulbert (laurent.fulbert@cea.fr)
Bringing photonics and electronics together
Leti's research strives to develop low-cost manufacturing processes for integrating high-speed, CMOS-compatible optical communications with integrated circuits.
Photonic devices, already well established for long-distance communications, have lower losses, higher bandwidth, and less vulnerability to noise. Integrating optical interconnects with conventional electronics could improve local networks, intra-system communications, and even data transfer within individual circuits.
Combined systems will need devices that can emit, guide, detect, and modulate light, as well as couplings between small scale on-chip waveguides and larger long-distance optical fibers.
Leti’s optical contributions
-One of the first requirements for chip-scale optical processing is coupling sub-micron waveguides to existing fibers. An inverted taper, developed at Leti and achieved using DUV lithography with CMOS-compatible deposition and etch techniques, links a nine-micron fiber to a 0.5 x 0.2 micron silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguide. It achieves better efficiency than conventional surface or edge couplers.
-In 2008, the PHOLOGIC project demonstrated an all-optical logic gate. The device eliminates the optical-to-electronic-to-optical conversion. Instead, a non-linear element made of a slot waveguide filled with silicon nanocrystals produced the logical XOR of two optical data streams, successfully operating at speeds above 40 Gb/sec.
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