Intel and the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) announced the demonstration of the world's first electrically driven Hybrid Silicon Laser. This device successfully integrates the light-emitting capabilities of Indium Phosphide with the light-routing and low cost advantages of silicon. The researchers believe that with this development, silicon photonic chips containing dozens or even hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers could someday be built using standard high-volume, low-cost silicon manufacturing techniques. This development addresses one of the last hurdles to producing low-cost, highly integrated silicon photonic chips for use inside and around PCs, Servers, and data centers.

Silicon photonics is a research and development effort to revolutionize Intel® platforms by developing silicon photonic devices manufactured using standard CMOS techniques. Over the next 5 to 10 years, the computing and communications industries face increasing challenges to deliver more data faster. Consumers will be downloading full-length movies, not just photos and music files. People will also require faster access to these large amounts of data. While Intel® microprocessors are projected to meet these future demands, the bandwidth of the interconnects needs to be increased to meet the speed of the microprocessors.

Read an overview white paper[PDF 517KB]
Refer to detailed technology papers and articles.
View Silicon Photonics overview video
Windows Media* - Choose Bandwidth:High | Low

In order to "siliconize" photonics, there are six main areas or building blocks for investigation. These include generating the light, selectively guiding and transporting it within the silicon, encoding light, detecting light, packaging the devices and finally, intelligently controlling all of these photonic functions. Intel is working to address these areas, and this research has produced a few recent success stories, including the first continuous-wave silicon laser and the first gigabit speed silicon modulator.

In a paper published February 17, 2005 by the prestigious scientific journal Nature, Intel researchers disclosed the development of the first continuous wave all-silicon laser using a physical property called the Raman Effect. They built the experimental device using Intel's existing standard CMOS high-volume manufacturing processes. This is the third silicon photonics paper Intel has published in Nature since 2004, beginning with the modulator breakthrough (see the Learn More section).

The breakthrough device could lead to such practical applications as optical amplifiers, lasers, wavelength converters, and new kinds of lossless optical devices. A low-cost all-silicon Raman laser could also inspire innovation in the development of new medical, sensor, and spectroscopy devices.

See a demo[Macromedia Flash* Need Flash? — Get it here] of the silicon laser, download the companion white paper[PDF 168KB], or refer to detailed papers and articles.

Optical modulators are used to encode a high-quality data signal onto an optical beam, effectively by turning the beam on and off rapidly to create ones and zeros. Before the year 2004, no one had built an optical modulator from silicon that was faster than about 20 MHz. In February of 2004, Intel announced in the prestigious scientific journal Nature the first gigahertz silicon optical modulator. By integrating a novel transistor-like device, Intel was able to create a modulator that scaled much faster than previous attempts. In 2005, Intel researchers further demonstrated that this silicon modulator is capable of transmitting data up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps).

Download a white paper[PDF 435KB] on the breakthrough modulator or refer to detailed papers and articles.

Over time, Intel's vision is to develop integrated, high-volume silicon photonic chips that could dramatically change the way that enterprises use photonics links for their systems and networks. Simply having photonics could eliminate bandwidth and distance limitations, allowing for radically new flexible architectures capable of processing data more efficiently. Silicon photonics may even have applications beyond digital communications, including optical debug of high-speed data, expanding wireless networks by transporting analog RF signals, and enabling lower-cost lasers for certain biomedical applications.

Explore the following links for more details on Intel research efforts in silicon photonics.

Optical Amplification and Lasing by Stimulated Raman Scattering in Silicon Waveguides, by Mario Paniccia, A. Liu, H. Rong, R. Jones, O. Cohen and D. Hak, Journal of Lightwave Technology

The Silicon Solution, by Mario Paniccia and Sean Koehl, IEEE Spectrum

Silicon Photonics Could Revolutionize Future Servers and Networks, by Sean Koehl, Converge! Network Digest

Silicon Shines On, by Jerome Faist, Nature

The Optical Age of Silicon," by Graham T. Reed, Nature

White Papers

Additional Resources

Nature, the home page for the international weekly journal of science. This journal is the flagship product of the Nature Publishing Group, which aims to provide the world's premier information resources for the basic biological and physical sciences.