VLSI photonics for high-performance data centers

Abstract

After over four decades of technology development and commercial application, photonics proves to be the best information carrier for long-haul communications. A huge effort has been taking and is still increasing to miniaturize such a photonic communication system to serve the same purpose when conventional metal interconnect in CMOS comes to its physics and practical limit. Along the road to siliconize photonics up to a much larger scale in order to design, fabricate, and test photonic links based on advanced CMOS technology, new architectures and device geometries are created and explored. In this chapter, we reviewed the development in architecture design, CMOS transceivers, and hybrid III–V-on-Si transceivers, particularly progress in HP, to unfold a technology roadmap of VLSI photonics application for data center from an industrial perspective.