Book Description

Modern high-bandwidth communications systems primarily use optical links to support data transmission across a range of length scales, from metro/long-haul for infrastructure backbones to shorter-range cables in data centers. As performance, cost, and energy-efficiency requirements become more demanding, optical links are expected to eventually supplant copper-based interconnects at the board-to-board, chip-to-chip, and on-chip levels as well. Most optoelectronic devices use III-V materials to achieve high performance. Though efficient, these materials are expensive, toxic, and incompatible with the standard high-volume silicon-based manufacturing used to build microprocessors. In order for the transition to optics to take place at the smaller length scales, a fully silicon-compatible photonics technology is needed to replace the III-Vs and allow us to leverage the practical advantages of silicon-based manufacturing. This dissertation presents a foundational set of new platform technologies that make major improvements to the current state of silicon-compatible optoelectronics research. In the first part, we present the development of a new method for manufacturing germanium--on--insulator substrates, an attractive materials platform for optical devices. In the second part of the dissertation, we introduce a new silicon-compatible platform technology that can be used to dramatically enhance the optical performance of germanium-based light emitters and detectors.