PHOTONIC PAGE BUFFER BASED ON GAAS MULTIPLE-QUANTUM-WELL MODULATORS BONDED DIRECTLY OVER ACTIVE SILICON COMPLEMENTARY-METAL-OXIDE-SEMICONDUCTOR (CMOS) CIRCUITS

We present a 2-kbit, 50-Mpage/s, photonic first-in, first-out page buf fer based on gallium arsenide/aluminium-gallium arsenide multiple-quan tum-well diodes that are flip-chip bonded to submicrometer silicon com plementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor circuits. This photonic chip prov ides nonvolatile storage (buffering), asynchronous-to-synchronous conv ersion, bandwidth smoothing, tolerance to jitter or skew, spatial form at conversion, wavelength conversion, and independent flow control for the input and the output channels. It serves as an interface chip for parallel-accessed optical bit-plane data. It represents the first sma rt-pixel array that accomplishes the vertical integration of multiple- quantum-well modulators and detectors directly over active silicon VLS I circuits and provides over 340 transistors per optical input-output. Results from high-speed single-channel testing and real-time array op eration of the photonic page buffer are reported. (C) 1996 Optical Soc iety of America