Intel builds modulator in silicon - Research and Development - Brief Article

Fiber Optics Weekly Update, Feb 20, 2004

Scientists from Intel Corporation have achieved a major advance using silicon manufacturing processes to create a novel "transistor-like" device that can encode data onto a light beam. The ability to build a fast photonic (fiber optic) modulator from standard silicon could lead to very low-cost, high-bandwidth fiber optic connections among PCs, servers and other electronic devices, and eventually inside computers as well.

As reported in the journal Nature, Intel researchers split a beam of light into two separate beams as it passed through silicon, and then used a novel transistor-like device to hit one beam with an electric charge, inducing a "phase shift." When the two beams of light are re-combined the phase shift induced between the two arms makes the light exiting the chip go on and off at over one gigahertz (one billion bits of data per second), 50 times faster than previously produced on silicon. This on and off pattern of light can be translated into the 1's and 0's needed to transmit data.

To date the fabrication of commercial optical devices has favored expensive and exotic materials requiring complex manufacturing, thus limiting their use to such specialty markets as wide area networks and telecommunications. Intel's fabrication of a fast silicon-based optical modulator with performance that exceeds 1 GHz demonstrates the viability of standard silicon as a material for bringing the benefits of high-bandwidth optics to a much wider range of computing and communications applications.