Akihiko Shinya
NTT Nanophotonics Center, Japan
Nanophotonics technology for low-latency and low-energy optical information processing
Abstract
In recent years, research on optical networks-on-a-chip (ONoC) has rapidly progressed. Nanophotonics technology enables us to realize ultralow-energy lasers, electrical-biasfree photodetectors that operate with optical signal energy alone, and ultralow-energy optical modulators. These elements have broken through the technical barriers to achieving energy costs below femtojoules per bit, which is impossible to achieve with conventional photonics.
Basically, ONoC is a technology for signal communication in a chip, but here we extend this approach to the transistor level as a solution to the latency bottleneck in the electrical circuit. Our basic approach is very simple: We try to replace the critical path in the electrical circuit with photonic devices and achieve the calculation simply by propagating the light through the electrically controlled optical-path gates. In this talk, I will introduce an optical circuit based on a binary decision diagram that achieves the calculation while propagating the light and discuss linear and nonlinear nanophotonic logic gates. The linear gate can operate with very low power because it does not require optical non-linearity, and the nonlinear gate, which uses electrical nonlinearity through a combination of a photodetector and modulator, ensures the cascadability of the logic gates. We expect these elements to support low-latency and lowenergy optical processing.
Biography
Senior Research Scientist, Supervisor, NTT Basic Research Laboratories. He received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Tokushima University in 1994, 1996, and 1999, respectively. In 1999, he joined NTT basic Research Laboratories. He has been engaged in R&D of photonic crystal devices. He is a member of the Japan Society of Applied Physics and the Laser Society of Japan.