Abstract

This work passes an important milestone in the history of optoelectronic and perhaps even electronic technology in general, the demonstration of a VLSI-scalable electronic technology integrated with a high-speed, dense optoelectronic technology. With optoelectronic integration to silicon VLSI, one hopes to augment state-of-the-art silicon density and processing power with fast, highdensity optical I/O. This is the first integration of dense silicon circuitry (120,000 transistors/cm²) and dense optoelectronics (28,000 devices/cm²) on a chip, all operating at a clock of 250 Mbits/sec. Of course, we only produced a small operating area (480x480 μm), but the indications of our research are that chips on the order of 1 cm² are reasonable. This development potentially has the most impact in the field of photonics since the semiconductor laser and optical fiber transformed the telecommunications industry. The reason for this is first that it ameliorates the development of higher throughput (~ terabit/sec) switches,¹ impacting the multi-ten billion dollar/year switching equipment market and allowing telephony traffic at projected levels in the next century. Second, it alleviates the integrated circuit I/O communication bottleneck, thus potentially affecting the entire computing industry.

© 1995 Optical Society of America