Photonic integrated circuits for high-capacity optical communications

在过去的十年中，我们见证了互联网的惊人增长（每年超过40%），这是由数百万新用户和众多新兴在线应用程序（如Google、Facebook、Youtube、Twitter、Amazon等）推动的。随着因特网继续其爆炸式增长，需要更复杂的光学系统来提供更高的数据传输速率，这表明实施中的成本和困难急剧增加。为了解决这个难题，我们正在开发纳米级的光学器件，使我们能够在单个芯片上集成大量的光学功能。由于其极小的尺寸和高度集成，可以以最小的成本和功耗产生超高速光信号。特别是，这些设备是基于硅的，硅是一种制造数十亿微电子芯片的材料。这是令人兴奋的，因为利用已经为微电子建立的最先进的制造设施来扩展光通信系统的复杂性的巨大潜力。这项研究如果成功，可能会彻底改变电信，导致互联网速度的巨大飞跃。

Over the past decade, we have witnessed an incredible increase of Internet growth (greater than 40% per year) driven by millions of new users and numerous emerging on-line applications such as Google, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Amazon, etc. This expansion would be impossible without the physical support of high-speed optical communications. As the Internet continues its explosive growth, more complex optical systems are needed to provide higher data transmission rates, indicating dramatically increased costs and difficulties in implementation. To solve this dilemma, we are developing nanometer-scale optical devices that allow us to integrate a large number of optical functions on a single chip. Owing to their extremely small footprints and high-level integration, ultra-high-speed optical signals can be generated with minimized cost and power consumption. In particular, these devices are based on silicon, a material on which billions of microelectronic chips have been fabricated. This is exciting because of the great potential to leverage the most sophisticated manufacturing facilities, which are already established for microelectronics, to scale complexity of optical communication systems. This research, if successful, may revolutionize telecommunications, leading to giant leaps of Internet speed.