Monolithically Integrated CMOS Electronics in Zero-Change Silicon Photonics

Monolithic cointegration of electronics and photonics in the same silicon die is expected to enable a new realm of high-performance electro-optical systems for telecommunications, automotive, datacenter and sensing applications. As an alternative to integrating photonic devices into well-established microelectronic technologies, in this paper we report on the integration of CMOS electronic circuits in a commercial Silicon Photonics technology. Transistors with a threshold voltage of 1.84, a gain factor of 4 uA/V^2 and an Early voltage of 35 V have been obtained by using the same masks as the photonic layer, without any additional technological steps in a truly zero-change paradigm. The paper reports a first application of this novel approach, showing time-multiplexed control of a 16-to-1 optical router enabled by an on-chip analog multiplexer.