Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Sajjad Moazeni
Energy consumption of computing is becoming one of the major challenges for environmental sustainability over the next two decades. Optical interconnects will play a vital role in this domain to enable new compute paradigms as well as scaling out datacenters. During the period of this fellowship, I will be working on designing optical interconnects that allow ultra-low power (sub-100fJ/b) and high data rate (Tb/s) communications using micro-ring modulators (MRM) photonic transceivers in silicon photonics. More specifically, I will be leveraging these links for various applications in cryogenic temperatures (sub 70K) for quantum and cryogenic computing, superconducting electronics, and high-energy physics (HEP) applications. These MRM photonic transceivers are more power efficient than MZIs and can support wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) naturally. I will be optimizing the photonic devices, characterizing them, building suitable ultralow-power CMOS circuits to operate these devices, and demonstrating the system prototypes in a 4K cryogenic probe station.