Nonlinear siliconphotonics for optical communications

Silicon photonics is an emerging research area that capitalizes the investment realized by the semiconductor industry during the last decades. It leverages the existing technology to realize novel chips where the information is carried out by both photons and electrons. It has the potential to revolutionize the Information and Telecommunication industry, from optical interconnects to supercomputers, by providing cheaper, faster and more energetically efficient chips.

 

The silicon chips are patterned with submicron precision. This provides a fundamentally new scenario, where the light interacts with the matter in a strongly nonlinear manner. We focus on engineering devices by exploiting the physics at the ultrafast & nano-scale regimes.

 

This is a seed project from VR funding whose aim is to develop novel light sources for optical communications applications. More concretely, we harvest nonlinear physical interactions in waveguides made of silicon nitride to achieve multi-wavelength sources for optical signal processing at terabit per second speeds.