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In this talk we'll present the latest results on the integration of silicon-photonic interconnects in several fabrication processes. These include the world's first microprocessor communicating to the outside world with monolithically integrated Si-Photonic devices, as well as the first demonstration of photonics in a bulk CMOS process. We also illustrate some critical aspects of this technology that need to be addressed from integration, circuits and systems side. These breakthroughs pave the way for orders of magnitude improvement in performance of photonically-enhanced VLSI systems.
Moreover, just like integrating the inductor into CMOS in 1990s revolutionized the RF design and enabled mobile revolution, integration of silicon-photonic active and passive devices with CMOS is greatly positioned to revolutionize a number of analog and mixed-signal applications – low- phase noise signal sources and large bandwidth, high-resolution ADCs, to name a few.
Chen received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering Computer Science in 2009 from the University of California, Berkeley and the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 and 2015, respectively. Since 2013, he has been at the Berkeley Wireless Research Center as a visiting student researcher and, in 2015, he co-founded Ayar Labs, Inc. Previously, Chen has held internships at both Nvidia and Rambus. His research interests include design of energy-efficient interconnects, modeling and implementation of electro-optic devices and systems, and techniques for dense wavelength-division multiplexed (DWDM) optical transceivers.
