Journal: Nature Communications

Article Title: Energy harvesting optical modulators with sub-attojoule per bit electrical energy consumption

doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-22460-1

Figure Lengend Snippet: a Schematic of a low-power electro-optic transducer based on our photovoltaic (PV) modulator. Individual PV modulators connected to different sensing sites are addressed using different wavelengths through a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) scheme. The development of such a compact, low-energy electro-optical transducer is essential for sensing applications where the electrical energy at the sensing site is constrained. Examples include massively parallel readout of electrophysiological signals ( b ), readout of single-photon sensors operating at cryogenic temperatures ( c ), and readout of electrical signals in environments with high electromagnetic interference, such as in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) ( d ).

Article Snippet: We designed and implemented monolithic PV modulators in an unmodified 45 nm commercial microelectronics CMOS process (GlobalFoundries 45RFSOI, see “Methods”).

Techniques: Multiplexing, Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Journal: Nature Communications

Article Title: Energy harvesting optical modulators with sub-attojoule per bit electrical energy consumption

doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-22460-1

Figure Lengend Snippet: a Electrical energy consumption and demonstrated data rate for the lowest power optical modulators reported in the literature – . Devices fabricated in silicon (blue) and other material platforms (red) are shown. Photovoltaic (PV) modulation (gray shaded area) can achieve orders of magnitude lower power consumption at speeds below ≈3 GHz, approaching the Landauer limit for binary switching (dashed purple line). Black diamonds show experimentally obtained optical modulation presented in this work. Supplementary Tables and show more information on the different devices. b Measured I – V curves of two different silicon photonic resonant modulators under illumination. Photocurrent generation is clear. Energy harvesting is possible when operating the device in the gray shaded area, while conventional modulators operate in the yellow shaded area. The inset shows the measurement setup. More information is given in Supplementary Discussion . c Conventional modulation driving scheme. The V DD source needs to provide the energy required to charge the modulator capacitance and that associated with the work on photogenerated charges. d PV modulator driving scheme. The photocurrent is used to self-charge the modulator capacitance and the transistor channel, greatly reducing the electrical energy provided by the driver.

Article Snippet: We designed and implemented monolithic PV modulators in an unmodified 45 nm commercial microelectronics CMOS process (GlobalFoundries 45RFSOI, see “Methods”).

Techniques: