ECE PhD student Ms. Kaiyi WU, supervised by Prof. Andrew W. Poon, won the Best Student Paper Award 1st prize for the Optics and Photonics subcommittee
ECE PhD student Ms. Kaiyi WU, supervised by Prof. Andrew W. Poon, won the Best Student Paper Award 1st prize for the Optics and Photonics subcommittee at the 39th Progress in Electromagnetics Research Symposium (PIERS 2017), which was held in Singapore, 19-22 Nov., 2017. The winning paper is titled “Heterogeneously Integrated III-V-on-silicon Microspiral Disk Lasers for Optical Interconnects,” co-authored by Kaiyi Wu, Bo Xue Tan, Yu Zhang and Andrew W. Poon.
PIERS is an international forum on electromagnetics research reporting on the frontiers of RF, microwave and photonics. Key areas of interest include scattering and electromagnetic theory, metamaterials, plasmonics and complex media, optics and photonics, antennas and microwave technologies, remote sensing, inverse problems, imaging, radar and sensing.
Nowadays, the Big-Data information traffic in warehouse-level datacenters, such as Google’s and Facebook’s, demand exa-level of data communications. In order to support such a huge data traffic, optical interconnections are the preferred technology option to enable the necessary bandwidth with a low energy consumption. This work reports a significant technological advancement in optical interconnections demonstrating an integrated microlaser on a silicon photonic chip. The electrically injected microlaser allows a unidirectional laser emission into the underneath silicon photonic waveguide. It paves the way towards an on-chip integrated multiple-wavelength optical transmitter, with an array of microlasers each emitting at a different wavelength for wavelength-division-multiplexed communications in datacenters.
