Kotura creates WDM-compatible 32 GHz horizontal silicon photonics detector

June 29, 2010
Monterey Park, CA--Silicon photonics components company Kotura has demonstrated a high-speed horizontal germanium photodetector integrated with silicon waveguides on a single chip.

Monterey Park, CA--Silicon photonics components company Kotura (www.kotura.com) has demonstrated a high-speed horizontal p-i-n germanium photodetector integrated with silicon waveguides on a single chip. The integrated photonic device advances silicon-photonic-based optical interconnects.

"The previous research has focused on vertical detectors within sub-micron scale waveguides to achieve high speed operation. These typically exhibit high loss and are hard to integrate with waveguide geometries needed for other functionalities such as WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) multiplexer and de-multiplexer devices," said Mehdi Asghari, CTO of Kotura. "Our invention of a horizontal junction detector does away with conventional designs and creates a new structure that supports high speed operation and yet is compatible with a variety of waveguide heights including the larger waveguides needed for high performance WDM operation. These structures allow standard silicon processing techniques to be used to couple waveguides and photo-detectors on the same chip with extremely low loss and high performance. We have demonstrated devices with more than 32 GHz optical bandwidth @1V bias, a responsivity of 1.1 A/W, a dark current < 300nA and a fiber coupling loss of less than 1.2dB."

"A low-loss, high-speed, easy-to-manufacture detector is a key component for optical interconnects. When we evaluated these devices we were impressed by their performance," said Ashok Krishnamoorthy, principal investigator on this project at Sun Labs, Oracle America. "This horizontal junction detector is a huge improvement for several reasons, not the least among which is that it can be readily coupled to single-mode fiber. This opens the door for wavelength-multiplexed silicon-based optical interconnects that will reduce the complexity of connectors and cabling in high-performance systems."

"Now we can easily integrate WDM and detection functionality into one chip," added Mehdi Asghari, CTO of Kotura. "A single silicon photonics device that can take a single input stream of light with 100 WDM channels, demultiplex the wavelengths and route each wavelength to its own detector. We can envision integrating 100 receiver channels, each operating at 40 Gb/s, on a single chip."

The Kotura’s horizontal detector was developed as part of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s Ultra-performance Nano-photonic Intrachip Communications (UNIC) program in conjunction with Oracle America, under the leadership of Jagdeep Shah, DARPA program manager. An article, "High-speed Ge photo-detector monolithically integrated with large cross-section silicon-on-insulator waveguide," by Dazeng Feng et al. was recently published in Applied Physics Letters.

SOURCE: Kotura; www.kotura.com/news/062410.html

About the Author

Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)

Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.

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