ECE Calendar

Abstract:
The interconnect bottleneck that is starting to limit the performance of state-of-the-art computing systems is likely to be solved by optics. Because of the advantages of optics (e.g., dense wavelength division multiplexing, no Joule heating along the transmission lines, higher transmission speed), optical interconnects, which are being implemented for board-to-board and chip-to-chip use, will migrate to on-chip communication. New computer architectures that take full advantage of optics’ strength could then revolutionize the design of multi-core systems and greatly improve their performance. However, many questions, at the device and network levels, need to be answered before optics penetrates inside the chip. This presentation will start with a system-level analysis of the requirements for on-chip optical interconnects and then focus on state-of-the-art silicon photonics building blocks, including lasers, modulators, waveguides, and detectors.

Biography:
Dr. Fauchet received an engineering degree from Faculté Polytechnique de Mons in Belgium, an MS in Engineering from Brown University and in 1984 a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University. After teaching at Stanford and Princeton universities, he moved to the University of Rochester in 1990. Presently, he is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also holds appointments as Professor at the Institute of Optics, in the Departments of Physics and Biomedical Engineering and in the Materials Science program. Dr. Fauchet leads a multidisciplinary research effort in nanoscience and nanotechnology with silicon, with applications to photonics, biosensing, and energy. He and his students have authored nearly 400 publications. Among his awards, Dr. Fauchet received an IBM Faculty Development Award, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Prix Guibal & Devillez for his work on porous silicon. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.