Energy harvesting optical modulators with sub-attojoule per bit electrical energy consumption
Name
s41467-021-22460-1.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.02 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a3881c883360e11255915f3a5ebf94cd
Author(s)
de Cea, M
Atabaki, AH
Ram, RJ
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
de Cea, M, Atabaki, AH and Ram, RJ. 2021. "Energy harvesting optical modulators with sub-attojoule per bit electrical energy consumption." Nature Communications, 12 (1).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
AbstractThe light input to a semiconductor optical modulator can constitute an electrical energy supply through the photovoltaic effect, which is unexploited in conventional modulators. In this work, we leverage this effect to demonstrate a silicon modulator with sub-aJ/bit electrical energy consumption at sub-GHz speeds, relevant for massively parallel input/output systems such as neural interfaces. We use the parasitic photovoltaic current to self-charge the modulator and a single transistor to modulate the stored charge. This way, the electrical driver only needs to charge the nano-scale gate of the transistor, with attojoule-scale energy dissipation. We implement this ‘photovoltaic modulator’ in a monolithic CMOS platform. This work demonstrates how close integration and co-design of electronics and photonics offers a path to optical switching with as few as 500 injected electrons and electrical energy consumption as low as 20 zJ/bit, achieved only by recovering the absorbed optical energy that is wasted in conventional modulation.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-021-22460-1
