Seminars

Coherent Large-Scale InP Photonic Integrated Circuits

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Dr. Fred Kish

Abstract

The extension of the electronic IC concept to photonics ICs was first proposed in the late 1960s. Since this time, photonic ICs (PICs) have been economically challenged to provide the same value proposition as electronic ICs, resulting in a substantially slower technology and product development rate, especially for devices employing active elements. This trend is shown in Fig. 1 which shows the scaling of data capacity per chip for InP-based transmitters utilized in commercial networks. In 2004, the introduction of commercial large-scale dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) 100 Gb/s InP transmitters resulted in an order of magnitude increase in data capacity per chip by scaling the number if integrated functions by >10x. These devices exhibited both increased integration scaling within a given DWDM channel as well as integrating multiple (10) channels onto a single chip.

More recently, the adoption of higher spectral efficiency coding techniques and the scaling of total bandwidth has driven the integration density per chip by another order of magnitude, resulting in devices with >450 integrated functions per chip. This integration density has enabled the development of 500 Gb/s and 1 Tb/s coherent PM-QPSK (polarization-multiplexed quadrature phase shifting keying) multi-channel transmitter and receiver PICs that are subject of this talk. The large-scale monolithic integration provides significant reductions in the packing complexity, size, fiber coupling, and power consumption as well as improvements in reliability that offer significant benefits at both the component and system level and promise to enable the economic viability of next generation optical systems.

Speaker Biography

Fred A. Kish received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988, 1989, and 1992, respectively. His Ph.D. was obtained under the direction of Professor Nick Holonyak, Jr. on "Native Oxides on Aluminum-Bearing III-V Semiconductors with Applications to High-Performance Laser Diodes". This work is part of the core Al-bearing III-V native-oxide technology that has enabled the development of the highest performance VCSELs and has been licensed to VCSEL manufacturers throughout the world. From 1992 to 1999, he was at Hewlett-Packard’s optoelectronics division where he co-invented and led the commercialization of the highest performance (efficiency) red-orange-yellow visible LEDs produced at the time (wafer-bonded transparent-substrate AlGaInP LEDs). The efficiencies of these devices exceeded those of incandescent and halogen lamps. From 1999 to 2001, he was with Agilent Technologies as the department manager of III-V R&D and Manufacture in the Network Solution Division. There, he led a department that developed commercially viable 2.5Gb/s VCSELs and VCSEL/detector arrays (12 x 2.5 Gb/s) for next generation fiber-optic transceiver and parallel-optic transmitter/receiver products.

In 2001, he joined Infinera as Vice President of photonic integrated circuit (PIC) development and manufacturing and later as Sr. Vice-President of the Integrated Optical Components Group. At Infinera, he co-invented and led the effort to research, develop, and commercialize the first practical (commercially deployed) large-scale InP PICs. These large-scale PICs are at the core of Infinera’s optical network products that have achieved #1 market share in North America and #2 market share worldwide in the long-haul DWDM optical communications market.

Dr. Kish is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the IEEE and has been awarded the 1987 E.C. Jordan Award and the 1992 R.T. Chien Award from the University of Illinois, the 1996 Adolph Lomb Award from the OSA, the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors 1997 Young Scientist Award, the 1999 IEEE LEOS Engineering Achievement Award, the 2000 University of Illinois Electrical and Computer Engineering Young Alumni Achievement Award, and the 2004 IEEE David Sarnoff Award. He has coauthored over 100 U.S. Patents and over 50 peer-reviewed publications.