Light up the Future of Silicon Microprocessors
Name
Kimerling_Light up.pdf
Size
945.43 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
dfd7c4aaca69e9cdd8794977247ed559
Author(s)
Liu, Jifeng
Michel, Jurgen
Beals, Mark A.
Kimerling, Lionel C.
Date Issued
2009
Journal
ECS Transactions
Publisher
The Electrochemical Society
Citation
Liu, Jifeng, Mark Beals, Jurgen Michel, and Lionel Kimerling. “Light up the Future of Silicon Microprocessors.” In ECS Transactions, 17-28. © 2009 ECS - The Electrochemical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
For decades, the performance of Si microprocessors has increased exponentially following "Moore's Law" by shrinking the dimensions of transistors. However, the progress in microchip performance has become stagnant since 2004 despite the continued device dimension shrinkage mainly due to power consumption and latency issues in traditional electronic interconnects that ended clock frequency scaling. It has become increasingly clear that parallelism is replacing traditional clock frequency scaling, and electronic-photonic synergy that takes the advantage of high bandwidth and energy-efficient photonic interconnects, is the key to high functionality extension of Moore's Law. We present an overview on the recent progress in Si photonic devices and their integration with CMOS fabrication process, including high performance waveguides, couplers, filters, modulators and photodetectors on a Si platform. Photonic data links based on these integrated photonic devices provide large bandwidth and low energy consumption for future generations of microprocessors.
MIT Department
MIT Materials Research Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Microphotonics Center
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1149/1.3118927
