Integration of Electronics and Photonics on Monolithic Silicon to Improve the Performance of Conventional Electronic Devices
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2016-12
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
AAU
Abstract
Conventional electronics have shown dramatic improvement in dimensions and performances over the
last four decades and plays a great role in computing, storing, transmitting and retrieving data in all
electronic devices. However, chip-to-chip and on-chip interconnect which have affected by a parasitic
load became the real performance bottleneck due to its extremely reduced cross section dimension
along with moore‘s law. Now, there are metal (copper) interconnections and dielectric materials in IC
fabrications that faces great challenges for the future in the electronics, imposing problems of
interconnect that the performance and functionality of conventional electronic devices are leading
their physical limit in speed, bandwidth, power consumption (heating) and electromagnetic
interference.
In contrary, photonic devices have advantages like large bandwidth, lower power consumption (low
heating) and immune to electromagnetic interference. So an integrated electro-photonic interconnect
have seen an alternate solution for the future technology nodes due to their special physical
characteristics. Therefore in order to overcome these electronic limitations ha ve been faced, an
integrated electronics and photonics on monolithic silicon substrate has been proposed as a potential
solution by merging the advantage of both technologies, electronics for data processing and storing
while photonics for both on-chip and off-chip interconnection to obtain a future supper computing
device.
To study the integration of electronics and photonics on monolithic silicon substrate to improving the
performance of conventional electronic devices, two experimental set up were prepared on laboratory
at device level. The first experimental set up was integrated electronic and photonic interconnect. Its
components were connected with waveguide or glass rod and represented by electrophotonic
interconnect. The second experimental set up was conventional electronic circuit. Its components were
connected by copper wire (Cu). Both experiments had similar three different lengths (30, 10, and 5)
cm of Cu wire and waveguide at
of 1mm and 1cm respectively for both voltage and current
output measurements from the system. And both experiments had again similar three different
(13, 9, and 6) mm of Cu wires and (1, 0.5, and 0.2) mm of waveguides at equal length
of 25cm for delay and powe r measurements in the system at different clock frequencies (50, 75 and
diameters
100) kHz. Comparisons were made and based on the result found electrophotonic interconnect
performed better than that of the Cu interconnect in terms of delay and power. Therefore, delay and
power dissipation on Cu interconnect was higher than electrophotonic interconnect by 62.8% and 60%
respectively.
Description
Keywords
Photonic, Electronics, Monolithic Silicon, Electronic Devices