Achievement

EECS trainee James Ferrara has been working on Silicon Photonics (SiP) heterogeneous integration with III-V optical devices. III-V materials offer excellent high-speed, low-loss, light-emitting properties that can potentially serve the high-bandwidth demands of state-of-the-art electrical interconnects. The silicon industry offers mature integrated circuit technology in the form of CMOS devices that doubles in computational power roughly every 24 months. Together, SiP-III/V integrated devices could leverage the high-speed of III/V devices and the computational power of CMOS integrated circuitry. James has been working on developing a process to integrate these two material systems via eutectic metal bonding, which would provide good thermal properties for the optical sources on Si, while harnessing the high-bandwidth properties of III/V laser light sources.