Innovative DWDM Silicon Photonics for High- Performance Computing

Electronics and photonics are foundational technologies that enable today’s big data era. For decades Moore's Law guided exponential growth of computing capacity in silicon chips, and generated data was transported globally through long-haul fiber-optic network. However, exponentially growing data is accelerating past the computing limits of Moore’s Law. On the other hand, conventional copper interconnect has already reached its physical limit, which requires a much larger volume of fiber-optic links to meet demands in bandwidth, power consumption and reach inside datacenters and supercomputers. Silicon photonics is one of the revolutionary innovations in the new Millennium, aiming to replicate the huge success of long-haul communications in datacom applications but with a fraction of traditional solution costs. Here we discuss our novel microresonator-based dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) transceiver architecture and recent progress on key silicon photonic building blocks, integration platforms, and several critical post-wafer fabrication steps for upcoming large-scale production. Innovations from materials, device structure, fabrication, testing, modeling, and packaging are covered in detail.