Future Trends in Microelectronics

2.6

High Sn-Content GeSn Light Emitters for Silicon Photonics

D. Stange, C. Schulte-Braucks, N. von den Driesch, S. Wirths, G. Mussler, S. Lenk, T. Stoica, S. Mantl, D. Grützmacher, D. Buca, R. Geiger, T. Zabel, H. Sigg, J. M. Hartmann and Z. Ikonic

Peter Grünberg Institut-9 and JARA-FIT, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich, 52425, Germany

Laboratory for Micro- and Nanotechnology, Paul Scherrer Institut, Villigen PSI, 5232, Switzerland

Université Grenoble Alpes and CEA-LETI/MINATEC, Grenoble, 38054, France

Institute of Microwaves and Photonics, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, United Kingdom

1 Introduction

The continuous progress of computer technology, with a larger amount of data transfer and higher data processing speed, has strongly increased the energy needed in order to run large data centers. With every new processor generation, the power consumption increases with the square of the clock frequency.¹ Given the development of IT networks, energy consumption becomes one of the main bottlenecks. A large fraction of the energy consumption in data centers (38% in 2009) is coming from the cooling systems used to dissipate the heat mainly produced by copper interconnects linking devices between and on chips.²

The partial substitution of copper by optical interconnects would reduce the heat generation enormously. Indeed, attenuation of data transmission at the 10 Gb/s rate can be 1000 times lower optically, requiring much less power.¹

The present chip technology is based ...