OPEL announces new laser by ODIS subsidiary

CANADA & USA: OPEL Technologies Inc. announced that its U.S. affiliate, ODIS Inc. has successfully produced an integrated laser device, thereby achieving a key milestone in its Planar Optoelectronic Technology ("POET") process, that enables high-performance devices fusing optical and electronic devices together on a single chip.

By allowing the production of components with increased speed, density, reliability, and lower costs, POET offers the semiconductor industry the ability to push Moore's Law to the next cadence level, overcoming current silicon-based bottlenecks, and potentially changing the roadmap for a broad range of applications, such as smartphones, tablet and wearable computers.

After years of increasingly successful development, the fabrication of the first Vertical Cavity Laser (VCL) utilizing ODIS's patented POET GaAs III-V technology is a significant success. Incremental progress over the years has led to what many consider to be the next phase of semiconductor development which is to surpass the capabilities of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology for the next generation of high speed low power applications. It is now widely believed that CMOS technology advances have reached a saturation point.

The new laser serves as the basis for chip-to-chip interconnection, and complements numerous other optoelectronic devices already demonstrated by ODIS - including heterostructure field effect transistors (HFETs), optical thyristors, pulsed lasers, and super-radiant light emitting devices - all able to be monolithically fabricated via the POET process.

"Rarely can one be part of a development that truly has the potential to change the way the things work on so many different levels and platforms. We believe that this is 'the key milestone' and indeed this is one of those moments. Dr. Taylor and the ODIS team have chosen to achieve the most difficult laser first and have done so under extreme duress. This is not just an endorsement of the ODIS Team but also of the POET process itself," summarized Peter Copetti, Executive Director of the Board of OPEL.

The essence of the POET advantage is the merging of optical devices into the growth and fabrication that supports complementary HFET analog and digital functions. The n-channel and p-channel FETs take advantage of the high mobilities inherent to strained quantum wells. Simultaneously, the quantum wells provide the active emitter for lasers and amplifiers and the active absorber for detectors and modulators.

The intimate connections between diverse device types enables novel gate designs which dramatically reduce the power consumed in the opto-electronic (OE) and electro-optic (EO) conversions. The VCL has the small footprint required for dense circuit layout and enables vertical connections from anywhere in the circuit plane to fiber or to other stacked chips. Further, the same VCL structure enables in-plane and edge emitting operation based upon proprietary OE designs. The availability of the integrated VCL will change the architecture and design for future complementary integrated circuits.

Going forward, technology development will lower the threshold current, increase the output power and optimize the in-plane version of the VCL. In addition, the complementary transistor circuit capability will be enhanced by reducing the feature size to the 100-nm scale incorporating ODIS' new self-aligned contact technology. With transistor cutoff frequencies around 38-GHz for a 0.7-um gate, the scaling is expected to produce 260-GHz transistors with commensurate improvements in circuit speed.

POET's short-term industry solution is expected to include an optical interface as a single chip to connect existing CMOS processors. The optical interface chip integrates the laser, modulator, modulator driver, detector, receiver amplifiers, serializer/deserializer, clock and data recovery, and phase-locked-loop circuits monolithically.

The longer-term solution would look to replacing CMOS gates with POET complementary HFET gates. POET processors would provide their own optical output and also perform the optical receive function and therefore the need for a separate interface chip would no longer be required.