Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2011
The semiconductor industry association roadmap has identified interconnects as a major barrier to progress starting in 2010. Optical interconnects (OI) offer an attractive solution for chip-to-chip communications, however there is no general agreement on how to design them. Eventually, OI may also perform a large amount of intra-chip clocking and signaling, which implies that any chip-to-chip OI system must be designed to be compatible with intra-chip OI, from the points of view of manufacturability, architecture, and device design. We are exploring the use of nanoscale silicon for OI. This paper reports progress toward the demonstration of two basic building blocks of an OI system, namely a Si laser and a Si-based modulator.