Jun 30 2010
Kotura has demonstrated a horizontal p-i-n germanium photo detector, which comes in a single chip combined with silicon waveguides. The photo detector was built under the leadership of Dr. Jagdeep Shah, program manager of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).
The detector was developed as part of the Ultra-performance Nano-photonic Intrachip Communications (UNIC) program organized by DARPA in collaboration with Oracle America.
CTO of Kotura, Mehdi Asghari, said that the horizontal junction detector develops a new structure, which supports high-speed operation and is adaptable with various waveguide heights required for high-speed WDM operations. The new structure allows waveguides and photo-detectors to be integrated on the same chip using silicon-processing techniques.
Mehdi Asghari commented that the company has demonstrated devices that have more than 32 GHz optical bandwidth @1V bias. He further added that a single silicon photonics device could take a single stream of light with 100 WDM channels, demultiplex each wavelength and connect the wavelength to its detector.
Principal Investigator of the project, Dr. Ashok Krishnamoorthy said the horizontal junction detector could be instantly combined with single mode fiber, which paves the way for silicon-based optical interconnects that would decrease cabling and the complexity of connectors.