Presentation

DescriptionSilicon Photonics (SiPh) is a promising solution to mitigate interconnect bottlenecks with better energy efficiency for data centers and high-performance computing applications. We have been developing 3D-integrated SiPh by implementing a dense wavelength division multiplexing with microrings for low-cost and high-performance photonic interconnect. It enables the smallest footprint as well as largest density and bandwidth, however, thermal management should be carefully considered. In particular, a microring’s resonance is sensitive to temperature and process variation therefore undesired resonance shifts should be compensated. With thermal tuning, a microring’s resonance wavelength can be re-aligned with an incoming laser wavelength to modulate and detect the light properly. From a system design perspective, the thermal tuning power should be estimated in the early design stage to calculate overall system-level power budgeting. In this paper, we propose a design methodology for thermal tuning power budgeting that includes the effects of fabrication and temperature variations in the photonic circuit simulation. With the proposed methodology, the required thermal tuning power is estimated accurately enabling the optimization of system-level power budgeting.