Near-Infrared optical transceivers integrated on SOI waveguides for optical interconnects

Near-Infrared optical transceivers integrated on SOI waveguides for optical interconnects

Description of the activity

In the last years there has been growing demand to manage enormous amount of data and the integration of different photonic components on the same silicon platform would combine the use of the mature silicon technology with the possibility to increase the transmission speed thanks to the use of light. Research activities of our group in this area are focused on the design, fabrication and characterization of transceivers for NIR optical communication. To overcome the problem of the NIR photodetection in silicon our group take advantage of his expertise in the study of the internal photoemission through Schottky junctions. Currently, the research activities are oriented towards two materials: erbium and graphene. Since the demonstration erbium-doped silicon light sources emitting at 1.55ÎĽm, we are studying the implementation of erbium to produce photodetectors integrated into SOI waveguides. Furthermore, we are investigating high performance and CMOS compatible optical modules implementing both modulation and detection functionalities with graphene layers sandwiched between hydrogenated amorphous-silicon and crystalline-silicon layers. In such a way the maximum optical power of the propagating mode perfectly overlaps with the Gr layer in order to maximize the light-matter interaction allowing with performance beyond the state-of-the-art.

Involved personnel

M. Casalino | M.A. Gioffrè | M. Iodice | G. Coppola | T. Crisci

National and International Collaborations

National Research Council – CNR (Institute of Sciences and Technologies for Sustainable Energy and Mobility – STEMS)
University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” (Dep. Mathematics e Physics)
University “Mediterranea” of Reggio Calabria
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (Departments of EEE, IIT)