High-performance silicon photonic switches

Silicon photonics is the study and application of optical systems by CMOS-compatible fabrication processes, which is the most promising solution to enable bandwidth growth in telecom and datacom systems. For instance, Intel is shipping 100 Gbps silicon photonics optical transceivers in volume for data center applications, Nvidia and TSMC are working on multi-GPU solutions based on silicon photonics, and Samsung plans to implement silicon photonics technology to increase processing speed while reducing power consumption and heat. Imec Optical I/O program, together with our partners, targets optical interconnect scaling for 1cm-1km distances through advancing silicon photonics technology. With our in-house 300 mm CMOS pilot lines, imec Optical I/O program has developed cutting-edge optical devices at wafer scale, including high-performance devices for optical communications at data rates of 50GB/s and beyond.

However, there are increasing demands for not only high data bandwidth but also high-radix optical switches in current AI era. For instance, Google is doing optical circuit switching (OCS) to achieve better performance, lower power, and more flexibility for its AI training cluster. The OCS is constructed with 2D MEMS arrays, lenses, cameras and more in rack-scale. This Ph.D. project aims to develop fully on-chip silicon photonic switches with low-loss actuation by means of Si/III-V carrier based or MEMS-like phase shifters. During this research, the Ph.D. student is expected to design high-performance silicon photonic switches after deep diving into Python programming and the physics behind silicon photonics.

In this research, the Ph.D. student will:

• Review the existing silicon photonic switches in literature.
• Design, simulate, layout and characterize silicon photonic switches with imec 300 mm silicon photonics platform.
• Improve the silicon photonic switches performances compared to state of the art by advanced optimization methods, such as classical local/global optimization methods, and black-box-like AI-driven optimization.
• Deploy the silicon photonic switches into optical interconnect systems with wavelength division multiplexing.