Electronic-photonic integrated circuits on the CMOS platform

The optical components industry stands at the threshold of a major expansion that will restructure its business processes and sustain its profitability for the next three decades. This growth will establish a cost effective platform for the partitioning of electronic and photonic functionality to extend the processing power of integrated circuits. BAE Systems, Lucent Technologies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Applied Wave Research are participating in a high payoff research and development program for the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) of DARPA. The goal of the program is the development of technologies and design tools necessary to fabricate an application-specific, electronic-photonic integrated circuit (AS-EPIC). As part of the development of this demonstration platform we are exploring selected functions normally associated with the front end of mixed signal receivers such as modulation, detection, and filtering. The chip will be fabricated in the BAE Systems CMOS foundry and at MIT's Microphotonics Center. We will present the latest results on the performance of multi-layer deposited High Index Contrast Waveguides, CMOS compatible modulators and detectors, and optical filter slices. These advances will be discussed in the context of the Communications Technology Roadmap that was recently released by the MIT Microphotonics Center Industry Consortium.