Well, it’s time for a shameless plug. I’m going to be talking this year at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, CA. I’ll be presenting the paper for my day-job company (Luxtera) in session 13.7, “A 10Gb/s Photonic Modulator and WDM MUX/DEMUX Integrated with Electronics in 0.13µm SOI CMOS”. The talk should be pretty exciting–we will be showing some really remarkable results. I can’t talk about it here due to the rules of the conference, but maybe after I’ve given the talk I can expound on things a bit. If you’re going to be at the conference, give me a holler!
Here’s the abstract of the talk:
Monolithic integration of both photonic and electronic components operating at 10Gb/s in a 0.13µm SOI CMOS process for PowerPC processors is presented. A modulator uses free carrier plasma dispersion in a reverse-biased PIN optical phase shifter in a Mach-Zender interferometer. An AWG demultiplexer uses a forward-biased PIN phase shifter to compensate the optical path length improving the channel separation.
Basically, Luxtera is the first company to realize a fully integrated silicon-photonic system. This kind of integration brings the benefits of silicon economy to photonics, which means that fiberoptics will become cheap enough to be a standard feature in desktops in the not too distant future. < /shameless plug>
