Thermal Management of Optoelectronic System (ePub)

The efficient nature of transmitting high-speed data optically over long distances makes photonic devices and components key enablers to support the massive growth in data traffic. Silicon (Si) photonics is currently an active area of research due to the advantages of using Si/SiO2 for passive photonic components to achieve, for example, low loss waveguides and compact arrayed waveguides, the potential for tighter integration with Si-based electronics, as well as a significant processing infrastructure built up by investment in complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Arguing economies of scale, the potential of leveraging CMOS technology offers promise for reducing the cost of silicon-based photonic integrated circuits (PIC) in comparison to their monolithic III-V material counterparts. However, this level of integration also poses significant challenges due to the very different thermal profiles associated with photonics and electronics. The above optoelectronic development makes thermal management more challenging. For example, the thermal solutions should be CMOS-compatible and the temperature at certain locations has to be precisely controlled (±0.01 oC). All the thermal challenges and new requirements appearing in the optoelectronic systems are present in this book.