Optoelectronic Building Blocks with Nanoscale Silicon

A complete optoelectronic system includes many building blocks, such as light sources, modulators, switches, transmission links, and photodetectors. For many years, conventional wisdom stated that at least some of these building blocks could not be made in silicon. Significant progress has been made over the past few years and now it appears possible that all the functionalities required of a complete optoelectronic link will be feasible in silicon. In this talk, I review the state-of-the-art in this field with emphasis on silicon-based LEDs (and lasers ?) that use quantum dots and modulators/switches that use active silicon photonic bandgap structures. These building blocks can lead to intra- and inter-chip optical interconnects.

 

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Speaker Biography:

Dr. Fauchet is a Distinguished Professor and the Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester. He also is a Professor of Optics and of Biomedical Engineering, a Senior Scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, and the founding Director of the Center for Future Health. His current research interests include porous silicon, silicon quantum dots, and other forms of nanoscale silicon objects for optoelectronic and biosensing applications. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Optical Society of America, and the American Physical Society.