Download or read book Integrated Energy Efficient Silicon Modulators for Optical Interconnects written by Seyedreza Hosseini and published by . This book was released on 2018* with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Silicon Photonic Modulators for Low power Applications written by Palmer, Robert and published by KIT Scientific Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, silicon photonic integrated circuits are combined with electro-optic organic materials for realizing energy-efficient modulators with unprecedented performance. These silicon-organic hybrid Mach-Zehnder modulators feature a compact size, sub-Volt drive voltages, and they support data rates up to 84 Gbit/s. In addition, a wet chemical waveguide fabrication scheme and an efficient fiber-chip coupling scheme are presented.

Download or read book Design Analysis and Performance of a Silicon Photonic Traveling Wave Mach Zehnder Modulator written by David Patel and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Silicon photonics is a technology platform for integrating passive and active optical devices. The ability to use existing CMOS-VLSI foundry processes to fabricate integrated optics enables large volume production at low costs while maintaining compatibility with electronic integrated circuits. With the recent explosion in network traffic, large datacenters are demanding higher and higher intra-datacenter transmission speeds over distances of up to 20 km. For this application, optical interconnects are more energy efficient and are able to satisfy the bandwidth demands of the foreseeable future. Optical modulators are an essential component of these communication links and immense research is dedicated to developing efficient high bitrate devices. It is desirable to have high bitrate transmission over a single channel because it simplifies multiplexing (e.g., fewer wavelengths and parallel fibers) which can increase costs. The work presented in this thesis uses the silicon photonic platform to realize an integrated Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) suitable for datacenter communication links.A series push-pull traveling wave MZM is designed using T-shaped extensions to increase the microwave index. The modulator is designed to have a characteristic impedance close to 50 Ohms for matching with common microwave drivers and terminations. In addition, the group velocities of the microwave and optical wave are closely matched to optimize the electro-optic bandwidth. A 37 GHz -3 dB electro-optic bandwidth was measured at 1 V reverse bias. The DC Vpi was measured to be 7 V in the most efficient arm, corresponding to a VpiLpi of 2.8 V-cm. For on-off keying modulation, open eye diagrams are visible up to 60 Gbps. Error-free operation with a bit error rate (BER)

Download or read book Integrated Photonics for Data Communication Applications written by Madeleine Glick and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2023-07-26 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrated Photonics for Data Communications Applications reviews the key concepts, design principles, performance metrics and manufacturing processes from advanced photonic devices to integrated photonic circuits. The book presents an overview of the trends and commercial needs of data communication in data centers and high-performance computing, with contributions from end users presenting key performance indicators. In addition, the fundamental building blocks are reviewed, along with the devices (lasers, modulators, photodetectors and passive devices) that are the individual elements that make up the photonic circuits. These chapters include an overview of device structure and design principles and their impact on performance. Following sections focus on putting these devices together to design and fabricate application-specific photonic integrated circuits to meet performance requirements, along with key areas and challenges critical to the commercial manufacturing of photonic integrated circuits and the supply chains being developed to support innovation and market integration are discussed. This series is led by Dr. Lionel Kimerling Executive at AIM Photonics Academy and Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and Dr. Sajan Saini Education Director at AIM Photonics Academy at MIT. Each edited volume features thought-leaders from academia and industry in the four application area fronts (data communications, high-speed wireless, smart sensing, and imaging) and addresses the latest advances. Includes contributions from leading experts and end-users across academia and industry working on the most exciting research directions of integrated photonics for data communications applications Provides an overview of data communication-specific integrated photonics starting from fundamental building block devices to photonic integrated circuits to manufacturing tools and processes Presents key performance metrics, design principles, performance impact of manufacturing variations and operating conditions, as well as pivotal performance benchmarks

Download or read book Wafer scale Integrated Active Silicon Photonics for Manipulation and Conversion of Light written by Erman Timurdogan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silicon photonics is an emerging platform that promises to revolutionize integrated optics. This is expected to happen by inheriting the cost-effective, very large scale integration capabilities from complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process. The compatibility with CMOS also merges the electronics and photonics world in a single platform. While electronics are key for computations, photonics are key for communications. While the computations within a micro-processor was scaling, the communication scaling was limited by high-cost and high-power optical interconnects. The communication bottlenecks in micro-processors, data-centers, super-computers and tele-communications industry indicated a challenge for energy-efficient and low power optical interconnects for the last decade. This challenge have produced preliminary key silicon photonics components, including on-chip lasers, low-loss silicon waveguides, high-speed silicon modulators and detectors. However, the holistic approach was not used for addressing the needs for photonic components, photonics and electronics integration. Here, we demonstrate two major breakthroughs. First one is an ultralow power intrachip electronic-photonic link. This photonic link required to find efficient ways to realize active photonic filters, modulators, transmitters, detectors and receivers that operate with close to single femtojoule energy while tackling wafer-scale fabrication and thermal variations. To integrate these photonics components with electronics with little to no excess energy consumption, a seamless interface between electronics and photonics wafers was introduced, through-oxide-vias (TOVs). When the electronic-photonic integration was complete with TOVs, a communication link that operate at 5Gb/s with an energy consumption as low as 250fJ/bit, is demonstrated. Second, second-order nonlinear effects were missing in silicon due to its crystalline symmetry. The crystalline symmetry of silicon is broken with an applied DC field, generating second-order nonlinear susceptibility in CMOS compatible silicon photonics platform. The field induced second-order nonlinear effects are demonstrated in the form of DC Kerr effect and second harmonic generation in silicon.

Download or read book High Speed Low Driving Voltage Vertical Cavity Germanium silicon Modulators for Optical Interconnect written by Yiwen Rong and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2010 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information processing requires interconnects to carry information from one place to another. Optical interconnects between electronics systems have attracted significant attention and development for a number of years because optical links have demonstrated potential advantages for high-speed, low-power, and interference immunity. With increasing system speed and greater bandwidth requirements, the distance over which optical communication is useful has continually decreased to chip-to-chip and on-chip levels. Monolithic integration of photonics and electronics will significantly reduce the cost of optical components and further combine the functionalities of chips on the same or different boards or systems. Modulators are one of the fundamental building blocks for optical interconnects. Previous work demonstrated modulators based upon the quantum confined Stark effect (QCSE) in SiGe p-i-n devices with strained Ge/SiGe multi-quantum-well (MQW) structures in the i region. While the previous work demonstrated the effect, it did not examine the high-speed aspects of the device, which is the focus of this dissertation. High-speed modulation and low driving voltage are the keys for the device's practical use. At lower optical intensity operation, the ultimate limitation in speed will be the RC time constant of the device itself. At high optical intensity, the large number of photo generated carriers in the MQW region will limit the performance of the device through photo carrier related voltage drop and exciton saturation. In previous work, the devices consist of MQWs configured as p-i-n diodes. The electric field induced absorption change by QCSE modulates the optical transmission of the device. The focus of this thesis is the optimization of MQW material deposition, minimization of the parasitic capacitance of the probe pads for high speed, low voltage and high contrast ratio operation. The design, fabrication and high-speed characterization of devices of different sizes, with different bias voltages are presented. The device fabrication is based on processes for standard silicon electronics and is suitable for mass-production. This research will enable efficient transceivers to be monolithically integrated with silicon chips for high-speed optical interconnects. We demonstrated a modulator, with an eye diagram of 3.125GHz, a small driving voltage of 2.5V and an f3dB bandwidth greater than 30GHz. Carrier dynamics under ultra-fast laser excitation and high-speed photocurrent response are also investigated.

Download or read book High speed Energy efficient and Scalable Optical Computing and Interconnects with CMOS compatible Silicon Photonic electronic Integrated Circuits written by Chenghao Feng and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrated photonics is a promising technology for next-generation computing because of the essential characteristics of light, including low latency, high bandwidth, and low power consumption. In the past decades, Integrated photonics has evolved significantly over the past few decades, with abundant passive and active optical components offering ultrahigh bandwidth and ultralow power consumption. In addition, advancements in fabrication technologies have also enabled the co-integration of silicon-based electronic and photonic circuits on a chip, allowing for the realization of complex computing tasks with electrons and photons. Previous work reveals that photonic-electronic computing circuits have the potential to outperform transistor-based electronic computing circuits by orders of magnitude in speed and energy efficiency. However, the scalability of photonic-electronic circuits still requires improvement, which is critical to the success of optical computing in the post-Moore’s law era, especially given the need for this technology to compete with other emerging computing technologies. This dissertation proposes the development of scalable photonic-electronic integrated circuits that capitalize on the strengths of electrons and photons to facilitate high-speed, energy-efficient computing and intra-chip interconnects. We explore scaling technologies for photonic computing systems that optimize the area and energy efficiency, such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), and demonstrate their effectiveness through experimental demonstrations. Our investigation of photonic-electronic computing circuits spans from the device to the architecture level and includes both digital and analog computing. We first introduce the building blocks of optical computing, including essential components like electro-optic modulators, and discuss general scaling technologies in silicon-based photonic-electronic computing circuit designs. We then present a WDM-based photonic-electronic digital comparator with experimental demonstrations that exhibit its practicality in performing high-performance arithmetic logic operations. Next, we investigate photonic-electronic circuits for intra-chip interconnect with a WDM-based photonic-electronic switching network. These photonic-electronic digital logic circuits can be operated at 20 Gb/s with experimental demonstrations. Additionally, we focus on optical analog computing and discuss scaling strategies for photonic-electronic analog computing circuits that can accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) tasks. We present a subspace optical neural network architecture that trades the universality of weight representation for better hardware usage, such as a smaller footprint and lower energy consumption. We experimentally demonstrate its utility using a butterfly-style photonic-electronic neural chip. Finally, we investigate device-level optimization of the optical neural network using a promising multi-operand optical neuron to further scale down the footprint of photonic neural chips. We conduct thorough performance discussions of these photonic-electronic computing circuits, demonstrating their potential to outperform transistor-based computing circuits in terms of computational speed and energy efficiency

Download or read book Electro optic Frequency Comb Generation Using Silicon Photonic Modulators written by Mostafa Khalil and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Silicon photonics is the most promising candidate to achieve the high data transmission rates required for future telecommunications bandwidth demands, which require upgraded optical interconnects. Optical modulators, such as Mach-Zehnder modulators, are one of the most important sub-components in any optical communication system. Leveraging the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication processes, the integration of optical devices become more cost effective and energy efficient. Optical frequency comb has widespread applications in microwave photonics and optical communications as a multi-wavelength source for wavelength division multiplexing and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. The most common approach to generate optical frequency comb is based on the use of optical modulators. On-chip optical frequency comb generation has great flexibility to tune the center frequency based on the frequency of the continuous wave laser, comb spacing, and the number of comb lines based on adjusting the RF signal frequency, power, and phase that is applied to the electro-optic modulator. The limitation of this technique lies in the high insertion loss, especially in cascaded modulators. In this thesis, we investigate two integrated cascaded electro-optic modulators in CMOS-compatible silicon-on-insulator for optical frequency comb generation. The first comprises cascaded push-pull traveling wave Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) while the second involves cascaded microring modulators (MRM). The 9 comb lines with a spacing up to 10 GHz and bandwidth of 90 GHz for the cascaded MZM, and 5 comb lines with a spacing up to 10 GHz and a bandwidth of 50 GHz for the cascaded MRM. The measured temporal waveforms corresponding to the generated quasi-rectangular combs match with the sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses which are well-known for its high spectral efficiency and have zero inter-symbol interference. Lastly, we summarize and compare the performance of both modulators"--

Download or read book Advancing Silicon Photonics Through Germanium Based Devices and 3D Integration written by Shashank Gupta and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silicon Photonics is considered to be essential for the sustained growth of semiconductor industry moving forward. The ubiquitous mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) are driving the data needs of the end user exponentially which has led to numerous data centers and perilously large power consumption in each of them. More than 3.4 billion people in the world have access to internet today and this number is increasing steadily day by day. Together, we generate more than 50 Terabytes (50,000 Gigabytes) of internet traffic per second at any given point of time. This number was just 100 Gigabytes per second in 2002 and it is expected to grow much faster going into the future. As for the power consumption, US data centers alone consumed about 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2014, representing 2 percent of the country's total energy consumption, according to a study. That's equivalent to the amount consumed by about 6.4 million average American homes that year. This is a 4 percent increase in total data center energy consumption from 2010 to 2014, and a huge change from the preceding five years, during which total US data center energy consumption grew by 24 percent, and an even bigger change from the first half of last decade, when their energy consumption grew nearly 90 percent. It is well established that the copper cables which transfer data from one end of the data-center to the other are the bottlenecks reducing the overall bandwidth of the system and skyrocketing the power consumption on the whole. This bottleneck is getting worse day by day owing to the ever-increasing data needs. Silicon Photonics based 'optical interconnects' are the best solution to remove this bottleneck. Optical interconnects use photons instead of electrons for communication and therefore have the potential to offer very large bandwidths at minimal power consumption. In the very near future all the copper wires in the data-center ecosystem will have to be replaced by these optical interconnects if we must meet the data needs within the prescribed power budget. In order to build such a platform where conventional machines in the data center work in tandem with novel interconnects based on photon-devices, all the optical components need to be integrated seamlessly on a silicon chip. Modulators are the most important optical component of such a platform since they act as optical switches which control the flow of photons. In the first part of the dissertation, a silicon compatible germanium (Ge) electro-absorption modulator with the best reported energy-delay product is demonstrated. The figure-of-merits along with the design principles are discussed in detail while the fabrication methodology is briefly touched upon. Experimentally measured characteristics are then shown to be the best-in-class and ones that match the data requirements of the data-centers with minimal energy consumption. In the second part of the dissertation, we focus on developing an efficient silicon-compatible light emitter based on strained Ge technology. Detailed theoretical calculations lay down a roadmap for room-temperature lasing from Ge. These calculations also prove that the loss mechanisms involved in the light emission process from Ge have been inadequately modeled until now and shows that a particular loss mechanism known as the inter-valence-band absorption is a major barrier in the realization of a strained Ge laser. CMOS compatible fabrication techniques to introduce large uniaxial strain in Ge are then discussed. Finally, a low-threshold Ge laser at a temperature of 83 K is demonstrated. In the final part of the dissertation, the first demonstration of a 'truly' silicon compatible three-dimensional (3D) photonic crystals is discussed. Using the methodology developed, a broadband omnidirectional reflector is also demonstrated on silicon. This methodology is also shown to be particulary well suited for 3D waveguides and optical cavities.

Download or read book Silicon Photonic Interferometric Modulators written by David Patel and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In recent years, the amount of traffic within data centers has increased to a point where electrical interconnects are being replaced by optical interconnects and pluggable modules. Silicon photonics, which uses the existing CMOS fabrication capabilities to develop integrated photonics, offers the ability to make compact devices in high volume with relatively better yield. This makes it a highly desired platform to develop optical transceivers and components for modern data centers. As such, it has recently reached the production phase of the technology development cycle. This thesis studies several devices that are applicablein leading data centers. A detailed analysis and characterization of a silicon Michelson modulator with short 500 um phase shifters and a low VpiLpi of 0.72 V-cm under reverse bias is presented. The optical modulation of reverse biased p-n and forward biased p-i-n junctions is investigated. For reverse bias operation, it is demonstrated that bandwidth can be increased with lower impedance drivers and the driver impedance limits the bitrate achievable. Furthermore, forward bias operation with pre-emphasized signals is shown to have clean eye diagrams up to 40 Gbps. Energy consumption is estimated for all cases of studies and their trade-offs are explained.The work on modulators is further developed by studying series push-pull traveling wave Mach-Zehnder modulators. Measurements of electrodes is compared with simulation validating the methods of increasing impedance and microwave effective index with T-shaped electrodes. Moreover, designs with two and three level implants are compared and it is concluded with measurements that a two level doping design is as good as the design with three level implants, thus reducing the number of masks and processing steps required. Another variation of modulators is the dual-drive modulators. Here, the spacing between electrodes can lead to coupling, which results in different responses depending on whether the modulator is driven single-endedly or differentially. The electro-optic frequency response of a four-port traveling-wave dual-drive modulator with relatively weak coupling amongst the electrodes is measured. It is shown that the electro-optic frequency response of the Mach-Zehnder modulator can be predicted with a 2x2 cascaded matrix model if the Mach-Zehnder modulator is symmetric and differentially driven. In recent years, the increase in data transfers has demanded that more bits be transmitted and received in a given bandwidth. The design and characterization of a silicon-on-insulator traveling-wave multi-electrode Mach-Zehnder modulator is reported in this thesis. This 2-bit electro-optic digital-to-analog converter is formed by dividing a series push-pull Mach-Zehnder modulator into two segments, one for each bit, thus allowing for PAM-4 modulation without using a digital-to-analog converter. The device is operated at speeds up to 50 Gbaud and thus generating 100 Gbps on a single wavelength without signal processing at the transmitter or the receiver. The pre-forward error correction bit error rate is estimated to be lower than the hard-decision forward error correction threshold of 3.8e-3 over 1 km of standard single-mode fiber.Another component that is crucial in optical networks is the optical switch. The optical switch has numerous applications in protection and restoration as well as in certain modern data center architectures. A 4x4 fully non-blocking crossbar switch fabric based on interferometric thermal phase shifters is developed and reported in this thesis. Here, heating is achieved using resistive elements around the silicon waveguide. Switching times of 5 us and 36 mW power consumption in an individual switching element is measured. As a proof of concept, the quality in degradation of switching is demonstrated by routing an input signal to some of the outputs of the switch." --

Download or read book Optical Interconnects to Silicon CMOS written by Gordon Arthur Keeler and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Silicon Photonic Modulators for Low power Applications written by Robert Palmer and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-09 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, silicon photonic integrated circuits are combined with electro-optic organic materials for realizing energy-efficient modulators with unprecedented performance. These silicon-organic hybrid Mach-Zehnder modulators feature a compact size, sub-Volt drive voltages, and they support data rates up to 84 Gbit/s. In addition, a wet chemical waveguide fabrication scheme and an efficient fiber-chip coupling scheme are presented. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Download or read book Silicon Organic Hybrid Platform for Photonic Integrated Circuits written by Korn, Dietmar and published by KIT Scientific Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We study the potential of the silicon-organic hybrid (SOH) platform for integrated optics. The unique properties of selected organic materials are added to silicon devices made with CMOS-based processes. We investigate the feasibility of this approach by making prototypes of key components in form of photonic integrated circuits: SOH lasers and SOH modulators are designed, fabricated, post-processed, and characterized. Application scenarios are identified.

Download or read book Optical Interconnects written by Lorenzo Pavesi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-05-17 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Optical Interconnects provides a fascinating picture of the state of the art in optical interconnects and a perspective on what can be expected in the near future. It is composed of selected reviews authored by world leaders in the field, and these reviews are written from either an academic or industrial viewpoint. An in-depth discussion of the path towards fully-integrated optical interconnects in microelectronics is presented. This book will be useful not only to physicists, chemists, materials scientists, and engineers but also to graduate students who are interested in the fields of microelectronics and optoelectronics.

Download or read book Integrated Silicon based Optical Modulators written by Kensuke Ogawa and published by SPIE-International Society for Optical Engineering. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book discusses the principles and the latest progress of silicon optical modulators as cutting-edge integrated photonic devices on silicon-photonic platforms, which play key roles in modern optical communications with low power consumption, small footprints, and low manufacturing costs. Silicon Mach-Zehnder optical modulators are emphasized as the principal small-footprint optical modulator because of its superior performance in high-speed optical modulation at operational temperatures beyond 100 degrees Celsius without power-consuming thermo-electric cooling in spectral bands over 100 nm"--

Download or read book Heterogeneous Integration of III V Semiconductor Compounds on Silicon for Functional Photonic Circuits written by Stanley Cheung and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been extensive research in realizing large-scale integration of silicon (Si) photonics for long-haul communications, high-throughput optical interconnects, and future high performance computing (HPC). The impetus for this research lies in the fact that the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform is fully compatible with CMOS technology which drives mature IC technology and allows for a convergence with large-scale integrated photonics. Recent advances in key components such as high-contrast, low-loss arrayed waveguide gratings/routers (AWG/AWGR), high speed optical modulators, germanium photo-detectors, and single-wavelength hybrid silicon laser sources have all paved a path towards realizing large chip-scale optical systems with various functionalities. Recently, the energy efficiency of these photonic components in an optical link have drawn strong attention with some projections indicating by 2020, the energy consumption of most components in 100-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) systems will be between a few pico-Joules (pJ) and sub-pJ per bit. Therefore, over the past few years, there has been keen interest in heterogeneous integration of III-V compounds with silicon to realize monolithic integration of efficient hybrid devices. This dissertation pursues the systematic development of passive silicon photonics and III-V InP/InGaAsP photonics to realize III-V/Si heterogeneous integration. Heavy emphasis is placed on optimizing the design and fabrication of the silicon photonics platform for optical routing as well as the III-V platform for optical gain functionality. Along the way, novel devices are developed such as high contrast and high resolution arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG) for optical mux/demux, continuous wave (CW) laser sources, and low repetition rate mode-locked lasers for on-chip frequency combs. In the end, this work culminates in the fabrication, design, and characterization of a hybrid III-V/Si platform via hydrophilic wafer-bonding that allows for the realization of semiconductor lasers and record efficiency III-V/Si optical amplifiers on a silicon substrate. We discuss the design and demonstration of highly efficient 1.55 [mu]m hybrid III-V/Silicon semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA). The optimized III-V wafer stack consists of Al(0.10)In(0.71)Ga(0.18)As multiple quantum wells (MQW) and Al(0.48)In(0.52)As electron stop layers to realize SOAs with high wall-plug efficiency (WPE). We present various designs and experimentally determine WPE values for 2 mW and 0.1 mW input power amplification. The 400 [mu]m long flared SOA achieved the highest WPE value of 12.1% for output power > 10mW and the 400 [mu]m long straight SOA achieved the highest WPE value of 7.3% for output power

Download or read book High Speed Low Driving Voltage Vertical Cavity Germanium silicon Modulators for Optical Interconnect written by Yiwen Rong and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information processing requires interconnects to carry information from one place to another. Optical interconnects between electronics systems have attracted significant attention and development for a number of years because optical links have demonstrated potential advantages for high-speed, low-power, and interference immunity. With increasing system speed and greater bandwidth requirements, the distance over which optical communication is useful has continually decreased to chip-to-chip and on-chip levels. Monolithic integration of photonics and electronics will significantly reduce the cost of optical components and further combine the functionalities of chips on the same or different boards or systems. Modulators are one of the fundamental building blocks for optical interconnects. Previous work demonstrated modulators based upon the quantum confined Stark effect (QCSE) in SiGe p-i-n devices with strained Ge/SiGe multi-quantum-well (MQW) structures in the i region. While the previous work demonstrated the effect, it did not examine the high-speed aspects of the device, which is the focus of this dissertation. High-speed modulation and low driving voltage are the keys for the device's practical use. At lower optical intensity operation, the ultimate limitation in speed will be the RC time constant of the device itself. At high optical intensity, the large number of photo generated carriers in the MQW region will limit the performance of the device through photo carrier related voltage drop and exciton saturation. In previous work, the devices consist of MQWs configured as p-i-n diodes. The electric field induced absorption change by QCSE modulates the optical transmission of the device. The focus of this thesis is the optimization of MQW material deposition, minimization of the parasitic capacitance of the probe pads for high speed, low voltage and high contrast ratio operation. The design, fabrication and high-speed characterization of devices of different sizes, with different bias voltages are presented. The device fabrication is based on processes for standard silicon electronics and is suitable for mass-production. This research will enable efficient transceivers to be monolithically integrated with silicon chips for high-speed optical interconnects. We demonstrated a modulator, with an eye diagram of 3.125GHz, a small driving voltage of 2.5V and an f3dB bandwidth greater than 30GHz. Carrier dynamics under ultra-fast laser excitation and high-speed photocurrent response are also investigated.