Electro-optical co-simulation for integrated CMOS photonic circuits with VerilogA.

We present a Cadence toolkit library written in VerilogA for simulation of electro-optical systems. We have identified and described a set of fundamental photonic components at the physical level such that characteristics of composite devices (e.g.

Integrated heterodyne interferometer with on-chip modulators and detectors.

We demonstrate, to our knowledge, the first on-chip heterodyne interferometer fabricated on a 300-mm CMOS compatible process that exhibits root-mean-square (RMS) position noise on the order of 2 nm. Measuring 1 mm by 6 mm, the interferometer is also, to our knowledge, the smallest heterodyne interferometer demonstrated to date and will surely impact numerous interferometric and metrology applications, including displacement measurement, laser Doppler velocimetry and vibrometry, Fourier transform spectroscopy, imaging, and light detection and ranging (LIDAR). Here we present preliminary results that demonstrate the displacement mode.

An ultralow power athermal silicon modulator.

Silicon photonics has emerged as the leading candidate for implementing ultralow power wavelength-division-multiplexed communication networks in high-performance computers, yet current components (lasers, modulators, filters and detectors) consume too much power for the high-speed femtojoule-class links that ultimately will be required. Here we demonstrate and characterize the first modulator to achieve simultaneous high-speed (25 Gb s(-1)), low-voltage (0.5 VPP) and efficient 0.

Photonic ADC: overcoming the bottleneck of electronic jitter.

Accurate conversion of wideband multi-GHz analog signals into the digital domain has long been a target of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) developers, driven by applications in radar systems, software radio, medical imaging, and communication systems. Aperture jitter has been a major bottleneck on the way towards higher speeds and better accuracy. Photonic ADCs, which perform sampling using ultra-stable optical pulse trains generated by mode-locked lasers, have been investigated for many years as a promising approach to overcome the jitter problem and bring ADC performance to new levels.