CAMBRIDGE, MA – A team of 18 researchers, led by MIT, Berkeley, and BU, reports a technique for assembling on-chip optics and electronics separately, enabling use of more modern transistor technologies. The technique only requires existing manufacturing processes.

“The most promising thing about this work is you can optimize your photonics independently from your electronics,” said Amir Atabaki, a research scientist at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and one of three first authors on the new paper. “We have different silicon electronic technologies, and if we can just add photonics to them, it’d be a great capability for future communications and computing chips. For example, now we could imagine a microprocessor manufacturer or a GPU manufacturer like Intel or Nvidia saying, ‘This is very nice. We can now have photonic input and output for our microprocessor or GPU.’ And they don’t have to change much in their process to get the performance boost of on-chip optics.”

Moving from electrical communication to optical communication could increase chips’ speed and reduce power consumption. The integration of optical (photonic) and electronic components on the same chip also reduces power consumption.

“We have access to photonic architectures you can’t normally use without integrated electronics,” Atabaki said. “For example, today there is no commercial optical transceiver that uses optical resonators because you need considerable electronics capability to control and stabilize that resonator.”

The researchers’ new chip includes the components necessary for optical communication: modulators, waveguides, resonators, and photodetectors.

The researchers experimented with a series of recipes for polysilicon deposition until they found one that offered a good tradeoff between electronic and optical properties.

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