Summer 2011 Intern Project- Anna Revolinsky

QUANTUM WELL INTERMIXING FOR HYBRID SILICON LASER INTEGRATION

Anna Revolinsky
Electrical Engineering
UC Santa Barbara

Mentor: Siddharth Jain
Faculty Advisor: John Bowers
Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering

Fiber optics facilitate high speed, high bandwidth communications, but require expensive components such as lasers and photodetectors to operate. Research in photonics aims to lower the cost of the components of the fiber optic system by designing devices such as the hybrid silicon laser, which combines the optical abilities of photonics with inexpensive silicon-based CMOS manufacturing. On this laser, however, data is still only transmitted at one wavelength, leaving fiber optic communication uneconomical. Our research in quantum well intermixing aspires to make the hybrid silicon laser transmit data at multiple wavelengths, thus allowing the integration of several photonic devices onto a single chip, which multiples the data transmitted by a single device. Our work involves analyzing two specific quantum well intermixing procedures-ion implantation and dielectric capping. We receive ion implanted samples from an outside vendor, anneal them at varying temperatures for a range of times, and then map the shift in the photoluminescence. The shift in the photoluminescence tells us the shift of the bandgap energy, which indicates the wavelength of light produced by that sample. We are also depositing various dielectric caps onto unimplanted samples, and annealing and measuring the photoluminescence change on those samples. We plan to document the trade-off between the implantation and dielectric capping techniques in order to select the ideal method for multiple bandgap integration. 

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