Ultra-Low Power Integrated Microlasers for Optical Interconnect Technologies

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Consumer demand for novel information and communications technologies with increasingly sophisticated applications continues to drive the semiconductor industry to achieve ever smaller and faster devices. New ways of sustaining this growth in technology are being sought, and promising approaches are nearing commercial realization. This growth increasingly requires moving immense quantities of information extremely rapidly - between users across vast distances, within devices from the core to peripherals, at the component level from chip to chip, or even on the chip. About 2.5% of our global energy consumption is now dedicated to this task, and this fraction is growing rapidly. The problems of heat and power consumption can no longer be solved at the purely electronic level. Over long distances, we now rely on optical solutions. This proposal brings the optical solution down to the chip level. With my team of graduate students and colleagues, I will design and build a fundamentally new kind of ultra-small laser for eventual seamless integration with the electronic architecture of current and future generations of computer chips. We will use engineered materials called nanowires as the optically active part (the "gain") of our microlaser. This is the part with the potential for electronic integration. We will achieve very low power lasing by encasing the nanowires in a material called a photonic crystal (the "cavity"). This is an engineered material that manipulates and controls the laser system's optical response by either forbidding or allowing light to move in certain ways. The laser is extremely small because photonic crystals work at sizes of only a few optical wavelengths, the fundamental limit to tailoring the flow of light. By independently engineering the materials that realize optical gain and cavity response, we have bypassed a fundamental manufacturing constraint of contemporary approaches to solid state microlasing. We will focus on realizing lasing in photonic crystal architectures, and then work toward achieving electronic integration. Because this integration will be solely through the nanowires, we anticipate that it will be far faster and have much lower power requirements than contemporary approaches.