Events Calendar

CA DREAMS - Technical Seminar Series

Speaker: Azita Emami, Professor, Caltech

Talk Title: Electronic-Photonic Co-Design for High-Speed Data Communication and Beyond

Abstract: Data centers continue to demand interconnect solutions with higher bandwidth densities and improved energy efficiency. Furthermore, applications such as chip-to-chip interconnects in switches, high-performance FPGAs and GPUs call for compact form-factors, high-volume production and low cost. Silicon Photonics (SiP)-based transceivers, when co-packaged with CMOS electronics, offer a promising avenue to meet these demands with speeds exceeding 100 Gb/s per wavelength. In this talk we focus on architectural and circuit-level techniques for both PICs and EICs to improve the energy-efficiency at high data rates. We will discuss how various types of optical modulators and optical architectures can be employed to achieve higher-order modulation schemes. We will first present a 100Gb/s 3D integrated Sip-CMOS PAM4 optical transmitter system. The photonic chip includes a push-pull segmented MZM structure using highly capacitive, yet optically efficient MOSCAP phase modulators. Co-design and optimum bandwidth enhancement techniques are employed to achieve high data rates and energy efficiency. Next a 100Gb/s DAC-less PAM-4 transmitter and a 200Gb/s QAM-16 transmitter in a multi-micron silicon photonics platform using binary-driven SiGe EAMs will be presented. In the second part of this talk, we will briefly show another example of co-designed electronics and photonics for sensing applications. We present a fully integrated fluorescence (FL) sensor in 65nm standard CMOS comprising on-chip bandpass optical filters, photodiodes (PDs), and processing circuitry. The metal/dielectric layers in CMOS are employed to implement low-loss cavity-type optical filters achieving a bandpass response at 600nm to 700nm range suitable to work with fluorescent proteins (FPs), which are the widely used bio-reporters for biomedical and environmental sensing.

Biography: Azita Emami is the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering, and the Director of Center for Sensing to Intelligence (S2I) at Caltech. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1999 and 2004 respectively, and her B.S. degree from Sharif University of Technology in 1996. From 2004 to 2006 she was with IBM T. J. Watson Research Center before joining Caltech in 2007. She served as the Executive Officer (Department Head) for Electrical Engineering from 2018 to 2024. Her current research interests include integrated circuits and systems, integrated photonics, high-speed data communication systems, wearable and implantable devices for neural recording, neural stimulation, sensing and drug delivery.

Host: Dr. Steve Crago

More Info: https://www.isi.edu/events/5480/electronic-photonic-co-design-for-high-speed-data-communication-and-beyond/

Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97017422125?pwd=Dbrt8MNMrmBV3xalKQJcAiNsggFJjJ.1&from=addon

WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/97017422125?pwd=Dbrt8MNMrmBV3xalKQJcAiNsggFJjJ.1&from=addon

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Amy Kasmir

Event Link: https://www.isi.edu/events/5480/electronic-photonic-co-design-for-high-speed-data-communication-and-beyond/