PhD Students and Graduates Won IEEE TCVLSI Best Paper Award 2018

ECE PhD students and graduates, supervised by Prof. Jiang XU, received the prestigious IEEE Technical Committee on Very Large Scale Integration (TCVLSI) Best Paper Award for modeling silicon photonic switches. The work was in collaboration with Intel and Validated. The award was presented by IEEE TCVLSI of the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) which addresses the interactions among the various aspects of VLSI design including system-level design, logic-level design, circuit-level design, and semiconductor processes.

 

The Award Winning Paper

Xuanqi Chen, Zhifei Wang, Yi-Shing Chang, Jiang Xu, Peng Yang, Zhehui Wang, Luan H.K. Duong, “A Comprehensive Electro-Optical Model for Silicon Photonic Switches”, in Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI, July 2018

 

Summary

Silicon photonic networks are revolutionizing computing systems by improving the energy efficiency, bandwidth, and latency of data movements. Optical modulators, such as microresonators and Mach-Zehnder Interferometers (MZIs), are the basic building blocks of silicon photonic networks. This work proposes a SPICE-compatible electro-optical model, BOSIM, to systematically study optical modulators using PN, PIN, and metal-insulator-silicon (MIS) capacitor device technologies. BOSIM holistically models both transient and steady-state properties, such as switching speed, power, transmission spectrum, area and carrier distribution. BOSIM is validated by the measured data from eight research groups and companies.

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