Photonic integrated circuits for high-capacity optical communications

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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.