A Three-Layer 3-D Silicon System Using Through-Si Vertical Optical Interconnections and Si CMOS Hybrid Building Blocks

We present for the first time a three-dimensional (3-D) Si CMOS interconnection system consisting of three layers of optically interconnected hybrid integrated Si CMOS transceivers. The transceivers were fabricated using 0.8m digital Si CMOS foundry circuits and were integrated with long wavelength InP-based emitters and detectors for through-Si vertical optical interconnections. The optical transmitter operated with a digital input and optical output with operation speeds up to 155 Mb/s. The optical receiver operated with an external optical input and a digital output up to 155 Mb/s. The transceivers were stacked to form 3-D through-Si vertical optical interconnections and a fabricated three-layer stack demonstrated optical interconnections between the three layers with operational speed of 1 Mb/s and bit-error rate of 10 .