Intel, UCSB Claim Hybrid Silicon Laser Breakthrough

By Colleen Taylor -- Electronic News, 9/18/2006

Researchers from Intel Corp and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) claim to have built the world's first electrically powered hybrid silicon laser using standard silicon manufacturing processes.

Touting their work as a breakthrough, the researchers said their findings are a huge step forward to producing low-cost, high-bandwidth silicon photonics devices for use inside and around future computers and data centers.

The hybrid silicon laser involves a design employing indium phosphide-based material for light generation and amplification while using the silicon waveguide to contain and control the laser. The key to manufacturing the device, the researchers said, is the use of a low-temperature, oxygen plasma -- an electrically charged oxygen gas -- to create a thin oxide layer roughly 25 atoms thick on the surfaces of both materials.

When heated and pressed together the oxide layer functions as a "glass-glue" fusing the two materials into a single chip. When voltage is applied, light generated in the indium phosphide-based material passes through the oxide glass-glue layer and into the silicon chip's waveguide, where it is contained and controlled, creating a hybrid silicon laser beam that can be used to drive other silicon photonic devices.

A laser based on silicon could drive wider use of photonics in computers because the cost can be greatly reduced by using high-volume silicon manufacturing techniques, Intel and UCSB said.

"This could bring low-cost, terabit-level optical 'data pipes' inside future computers and help make possible a new era of high-performance computing applications," Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics technology lab, said in a statement. "While still far from becoming a commercial product, we believe dozens, maybe even hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers could be integrated with other silicon photonic components onto a single silicon chip."

"We have demonstrated a novel laser structure based on a bonding method that can be used at the wafer-, partial-wafer or die-level, and could be a solution for large-scale optical integration onto a silicon platform," John Bowers, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UCSB, said in the statement. "This marks the beginning of highly integrated silicon photonic chips that can be mass produced at low cost."

The UCSB work was funded by the Microelectronics Technology Office of DARPA and Intel.

This is just the latest tech breakthrough being claimed by researchers at Intel.  In June, a team of Intel's researchers and scientists said they had attained signaling rates of 20Gbits/sec. between IC packages through flexible circuits.