Integrated Photonics for Tomorrow’s Needs on Today’s Silicon Platforms

Silicon photonics is now becoming a mature technology, with large companies such as Intel, IBM, Oracle, etc. developing transceivers to benefit interconnect technology.

Looking ahead, integrated photonics on a silicon platform can serve our need to measure, control, shape, and generate the electromagnetic spectrum, and re-engineer conventional linear, nonlinear and quantum optical devices and subsystems. We may be able to improve the usual metrics - how small, how much power, how fast, etc. – by many orders of magnitude, while adding the benefits of CMOS electronic compatibility, scalability and manufacturability.

This new vision for silicon photonics is emerging only recently, and can impact measurement and imaging technology, and nonlinear optics and quantum photonics as well (areas which have resisted widespread commercialization so far).

In this context, I will present examples of novel devices and subsystems we have designed:

i) Exploratory devices for processing data, including a WDM node-on-a-chip for a data center network, fast spectral monitoring, and disorder-tolerant devices for switching and filtering.

ii) Wavelength conversion with only a few mW of pump power, and the integration of mixers and high contrast filters on the same chip, with tuning knobs

iii) The first heralded single-photon source from silicon; photon pair generation in multiple spectral lines (comb); photon pair generation with user-controllable entanglement.

Shayan Mookherjea is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received the BS degree with honors from Caltech, the SM degree from MIT, and the PhD from Caltech in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Physics. His awards include: Wilts Prize, Hellman Faculty Fellow, NSF CAREER award, IEEE Senior Member, and OSA Fellow. The Micro/Nano-Photonics Group (http://mnp.ucsd.edu) started research in silicon photonics in 2007, and has active collaborations with several external industrial partners and foundries.