Thin Solid Films, Vol.508, No.1-2, 418-421, 2006
Si microphotonics for optical interconnection
This paper reviews current status of silicon microphotonics and the recent prototype of on-chip optical interconnection. Si microphotonics pursues complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-compatibility of photonic devices to reduce the materials diversity eventually to integrate on Si chips. Fractal optical H-trees have been implemented on a chip and found to be a technology breakthrough beyond metal interconnection. It has shown that large RC time constants associated with metal can be eliminated at least long distant data communication on a chip, and eventually improve yield and power issues. This has become the world's first electronic and photonic integrated circuits (EPICs) and the possibility of at least 10 GHz clocking for personal computers has been demonstrated. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.