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We demonstrate highly efficient vertical junction microdisk modulators with selective substrate undercut in a 300 mm CMOS foundry. The devices achieve record thermo-optic efficiency for sub-5µm radius, enabling next-generation low-energy, highly-parallel DWDM links.

 

As computing resource demands continue to escalate in the face of big data, cloud-connectivity and the internet of things, it has become imperative to develop new low-power, scalable architectures. Neuromorphic photonics, or photonic neural networks, have become a feasible solution for the physical implementation of efficient algorithms directly on-chip. This application is primarily due to the linear nature of light and the scalability of silicon photonics, specifically leveraging the wide-scale complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure used to fabricate microelectronics chips. Current neuromorphic photonic implementations stem from two paradigms: wavelength coherent and incoherent. Here, we introduce a novel architecture that supports coherentandincoherent operation to increase the capability and capacity of photonic neural networks with a dramatic reduction in footprint compared to previous demonstrations. As a proof-of-principle, we experimentally demonstrate simple addition and subtraction operations on a foundry-fabricated silicon photonic chip. Additionally, we experimentally validate an on-chip network to predict the logical 2 bit gates AND, OR, and XOR to accuracies of 96.8%, 99%, and 98.5%, respectively. This architecture is compatible with highly wavelength parallel sources, enabling massively scalable photonic neural networks.

 

Extreme skin depth engineering (e-skid) can be applied to integrated photonics to manipulate the evanescent field of a waveguide. Here we demonstrate thate-skidcan be implemented in two directions in order to deterministically engineer the evanescent wave allowing for dense integration with enhanced functionalities. In particular, by increasing the skin depth, we enable the creation of two-dimensional (2D)e-skiddirectional couplers with large gaps and operational bandwidth. Here we experimentally validate 2De-skidfor integrated photonics in a complementary metal–oxide semiconductor (CMOS) photonics foundry and demonstrate strong coupling with a gap of 1.44 µm.

 

Unitary operations using linear optics have many applications within the quantum and neuromorphic space. In silicon photonics, using networks of simple beam splitters and phase shifters have proven sufficient to realize large-scale arbitrary unitaries. While this technique has shown success with high fidelity, the grid physically scales with an upper bound of O(n2). Consequently, we propose to considerably reduce the footprint by using multimode interference (MMI) devices. In this paper, we investigate the active control of these MMIs and their suitability for approximating traditionally used unitary circuits.