New methods and ideas in silicon-compatible photonics

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This Discovery Grant proposal is for a program of research into the development of new silicon-based and silicon-compatible photonic light emitters. These will serve as the workhorses for a new generation of on-chip optically interconnected information-processing devices which will revolutionize a wide range of high-performance computing applications. All these applications require the development of an electrically pumped silicon-based semiconductor laser, a device which has never been fabricated because ordinary crystalline silicon is an indirect bandgap semiconductor which cannot emit light. However, in 1990 it was demonstrated that modified silicon can be a light emitter. Currently industry and academic research groups all around the world are aggressively pursuing the goal of being the first to fabricate a working electrically-pumped silicon laser device which can be integrated with existing silicon-based computer chips. The race is on, and we aim to be the first laboratory in the world to achieve this feat.