Towards Building Highly Integrated Photonics Circuits in Silicon

Abstract

Photonic integration in silicon is an extremely promising technology for developing massively complex integrated photonic systems-on-chip. This thesis describes work aimed at advancing the state of the art in silicon photonics, starting from device engineering and ending with system-on-chip transmitter demonstrations. The first portion of this work centers on the development of novel fabrication recipe that enables ultra high efficiency modulation in silicon. Then, work on the development of various passive and active photonics components in silicon-on-insulator platform is described. Passive components cover waveguides and couplers for mid as well as near infrared wavelengths. Contents in active components focus on the development of various advanced electrooptic modulators, including design, testing and data analysis techniques. Finally, making use of some of the previously described components, integrated transmitters with world record aggregate data rates are demonstrated, showing a level of integration beyond the state-of-the-art.