High-speed modulation of resonant CMOS photonic modulators in deep-submicron bulk-CMOS

Processor manufacturers have turned to parallelism to continue to improve processor performance, and the bandwidth demands of these systems have risen. Silicon photonics can lower the energy-per-bit of core-to-core and core-to-memory interconnects to help alleviate bandwidth bottlenecks. In this thesis, methods of controlling the amount of charge entering the PiN-diode structure of a photonic ring modulator are investigated to achieve high energy-efficiency in a constrained monolithic process. A digital modulator driver circuit is designed, simulated, fabricated and partially tested. This circuit uses a push-pull topology with pre emphasis to reduce the energy per bit and to prevent the ring's optical passband from shifting to the next optical channel. A flexible driver test circuit for in-situ device characterization has been developed with a device-to-circuit modeling framework. There are many tradeoffs that must be analyzed from the system, circuit, and device levels.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Moss, Benjamin (Benjamin Roy)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Vladimir Stojanović.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55122

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/55122