Light up the Future of Silicon Microprocessors

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.