Photonic Integrated Circuits for Optical Communications

Modern electronics began with the invention of the transistor and the discovery of minority carrier injection. These advances have fundamentally improved and changed our world. Essential to this progress is the scalable nature of semiconductor technology and the invention of the integrated circuit (IC). The IC has become ubiquitous and has had unparalleled impact as a result of the ability of semiconductor and transistor technology to continually increase the functionality, performance, and reliability of solid-state circuits, while reducing their size, power, and costs. A key value of the IC is the ability to realize many of these improvements by eliminating the need to discretely package and assemble individual devices or smaller circuits by providing the device and circuit connections via semiconductor batch and wafer scale processing.

The development of the semiconductor laser, the semiconductor alloy laser, and the associated viability of compound semiconductor alloys laid the groundwork for the possibility of extending the electronic IC concept to photonics. This was first proposed by Miller in The Bell System Technical Journal (1969). The application that has primarily driven the introduction and scaling of PICs has been their use for optical communications. The first commercial PICs for optical communications were not introduced until ~20 years ago with the development of electro-absorption modulated lasers. Over the last ten years, the commercial impact of PICs has substantially increased with the introduction of widely tunable lasers, and dense wavelength-division multiplexed (DWDM) transmitter and receiver PICs operating at 100 Gbps and 500 Gbps. These PICs integrate all optical functions required for a DWDM channel as well as integrating 10 of these channels onto a single monolithic chip for each transmitter and receiver. The commercial 500 Gbps coherent transmitter PICs integrate > 400 functions onto a single monolithic chip. This talk will review some of the seminal contributions, inventions and discoveries that were critical to the development and commercial introduction of PICs in the field of optical communications as well as the current-state-of-the-art (including 100 Gbps and 500 Gbps PICs). Furthermore, promising technologies for future generations of PICs will be discussed.

Fred A. Kish, Jr.

Senior Vice President, Infinera Corporation

Date: April 29, 2016 at 11:45 AM

Location: Monteith Research Center (MRC), Room 136

Distinguished Speaker Colloquium

Created and hosted by the NC State Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the ECE Distinguished Speaker Colloquium is our flagship seminar series, featuring presentations from distinguished speakers drawn from both academia and industry who will address a wide variety of topics of interest to our community. Everyone is invited to attend, from undergraduates on up to faculty and industry friends -- the level of the presentations will be for non-specialists and accessible to students., The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering hosts a regularly scheduled seminar series with preeminent and leading reseachers in the US and the world, to help promote North Carolina as a center of innovation and knowledge and to ensure safeguarding its place of leading research.

Interdisciplinary Distinguished Seminar Series

Created and hosted by the NC State Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the ECE Distinguished Speaker Colloquium is our flagship seminar series, featuring presentations from distinguished speakers drawn from both academia and industry who will address a wide variety of topics of interest to our community. Everyone is invited to attend, from undergraduates on up to faculty and industry friends -- the level of the presentations will be for non-specialists and accessible to students., The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering hosts a regularly scheduled seminar series with preeminent and leading reseachers in the US and the world, to help promote North Carolina as a center of innovation and knowledge and to ensure safeguarding its place of leading research.