Nearly all commercial integrated circuits built today are built using silicon wafers as the base. However, todays CMOS digital chips that can be found at the heart of every product from iPhones to supercomputers are fabricated quite differently from the silicon photonic chips that are designed to generate and manipulate photons (light). Bridging part of this difference is the goal of this TACFI. These fabrication differences are largely responsible for the fact that most electronic products including photonic functionality require multiple chips. This situation is compounded by the fact that, for some photonics functions. such as those that require thermal tuning of nanostructures, this tuning function may require higher voltages (as much as +/- 10V) in order to operate correctly. Thus, such systems can require at least three different chips as a part of the assembly (standard CMOS, silicon photonics and power electronics). Anametrics QRNG product is an example of this kind of system and there are many others, such as the photonic communications systems that form the backbone of the internet. Therefore, to maximize the reliability and reduce the cost of these higher chip-count systems, it is desirable to integrate the power electronics portion of the system into one of the other chips. For several reasons, we believe the most effective strategy would be to integrate the power electronics portion of the design into the silicon photonics chip. That integration is the goal of this TACFI project.
