Investigation of germanium and germanium-tin laser technologies towards electronic-photonic integrated circuits

Abstract

Since the first electrical integrated circuits (ICs), the level of integration has been increasing with the scaling down of transistors. Although it is possible to integrate a number of transistors in a single chip, however, the ICs suffers from a performance bottleneck. To eliminate the performance bottleneck, an on-chip optical interconnect system has been in the limelight. However, developments in on-chip interconnect system have been made slow progress due to the absence of efficient on-chip light sources.

Germanium (Ge) is the promising material for the on-chip optical interconnect system. However, Ge is not suitable for light sources because of its poor light emission efficiency. Thus, an efficient light source is the only missing key for the on-chip optical interconnect system.

Throughout this thesis, we discuss our achievements about the efficient Ge based light sources, which can pave the way towards the on-chip optical interconnect system.