Optical Amplification In Nanocrystalline Silicon Superlattices

Abstract

The ever-increasing integration density and operating frequency of electronic chips is causing an electrical interconnect bottleneck to emerge [1]. Today, the overall performance of a multichip computing system is dominated by the limitations of the interconnections between chips and it is predicted that this problem will migrate to the single chip level after one decade. Interconnects are now the major bottleneck not only in terms of limiting performance, such as speed and signal integrity, but also in terms of power use and heat dissipation. Material innovations and traditional scaling will stop satisfying performance requirements when the feature size approaches 50 nm. Without a solution to the “interconnect problem,” the growth of the semiconductor industry may come to a halt. Finding a solution to this problem is at least as crucial as any breakthrough in individual device performance (e.g., silicon quantum dot transistors) or any revolutionary advance in computing architecture (e.g., quantum computing).