Silicon resonant cavity enhanced photodetector arrays for optical interconnects.

摘要

High bandwidth short distance communications standards are being developed based on parallel optical interconnect fiber arrays to meet the needs of increasing data rates of inter-chip communication in modern computer architecture. To ensure that this standard becomes an attractive option for computer systems, low cost components must be implemented on both the transmitting and receiving end of the fibers. To meet this low cost requirement silicon based receiver circuits are the most viable option, however, manufacturing high speed, high efficiency silicon photodetectors presents a technical challenge. Resonant cavity enhanced photodetectors have been shown to provide the required bandwidth-efficiency product but have remained a challenge to reproduce through commercially available fabrication techniques. In this work, commercially reproducible silicon wafers with a high reflectance buried distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) have been designed and fabricated. The substrates consist of a two-period, 90% reflecting, DBR fabricated using a double silicon-on-insulator (SOI) process. Resonant-cavity-enhanced (RCE) Si photodetectors have been fabricated with 40% quantum efficiency at 860 nm, a FWHM of 25 ps, and a 3dB bandwidth in excess of 10 GHz. Si RCE 12 x 1 photodetector arrays have been fabricated and packaged with silicon based amplifiers to demonstrate the feasibility of a low cost monolithic silicon photoreceiver array.