THIN-FILM MULTIMATERIAL OPTOELECTRONIC INTEGRATED-CIRCUITS

The multimaterial integration of thin-film optoelectronic devices with host substrates ranging from silicon circuits to glass waveguides to polymer micromachines offers to the system designer the freedom to cho ose the optimal materials for each component to achieve performance an d cost objectives. Thin-film compound semiconductor optoelectronic dev ices are comparable to, and, in some cases, better than, their on-wafe r counterparts. Thin-film detectors have been integrated with receiver circuits and movable micromachines, thin-film emitters with drive cir cuitry, and both have been used to demonstrate three-dimensionally int erconnected systems. Vertical electrical integration of detector array s on top of circuits is examined for massively parallel processing of images. Vertical optical interconnections of stacked silicon circuits (which are transparent to the wavelength of light used) are explored, and are used to develop a massively parallel processing architecture b ased upon low memory, high throughput, and high input/output.