NTT Research and Development 2011 Review of Activities

Overview

Silicon photonics technology enables high-productivity fabrication of ultra-compact photonic devices. We have used it to monolithically integrate various functional photonic devices on a silicon substrate. This technology can reduce the size and power consumption of photonic devices for telecommunications applications, and moreover, it can be applied to optical interconnections of LSI electronic circuits. Thus, it can help to reduce the costs and environmental loads in both future telecommunication networks and data centers that have to deal with huge amounts of data traffic.

Features

• Ultra-fine silicon fabrication technology for making compact and low-loss wavelength filters
• Compact silicon semiconductor waveguide for dynamic photonic functions such as fast optical intensity adjustment and modulation
• Photo-detectors based on high-purity germanium grown on a silicon substrate(developed in collaboration with the University of Tokyo)
• Monolithic hetero-function integration on a silicon substrate
• Low power consumption through compact device integration

Application scenarios

• Fast signal equalization of photonic nodes using multi-channel integrated VOA-PD^*1 devices
• Low-power network operation with bandwidth control using compact WDM^*2 receivers
• Large-capacity access networks using compact multi-channel transceivers with multi-level modulation formats
• Low-power LSI electronic circuits with on-chip optical interconnections

• *1 VOA-PD: Variable Optical Attenuator-Photodiode
• *2 WDM: Wavelength Division Multiplexing