Silicon-based optoelectronic integration is a new technology developed at the beginning of this century. It is one of the most promising mainstream technologies in today's integrated optics. It uses microelectronic CMOS technology to fabricate optoelectronic devices on silicon materials with low-cost mass production. Advantages, and the potential for building on-chip optoelectronic subsystems with microelectronics fusion. Optical buffers, optical delay chips are important applications in optical communications and photonic information processing. In all-optical switching networks and broadband photonic information processing systems, they are used to resolve data contention conflicts. Accurate synchronization with the channel; In systems such as light-controlled phased array radar, used to achieve true optical delay, to overcome the phenomenon of aperture transition caused by the limited bandwidth of the electronic phase shifter, and to ensure that microwave signals with different frequencies have the same direction angle.
Professor Chen Jianping from Shanghai Jiaotong University, under the support of the National 973 Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Excellent Youth Fund Project, adopted the silicon-based integration technology, and achieved the nanosecond (ns) optical delay for the first time in the world. A number of digitally adjustable chips, research results have been reported by Nature Photonics as a research highlight (Vol. 8, Nov. 2014). This scheme can be used to implement a wide range of adjustable delay lines but it cannot achieve continuous adjustment and on-chip loss Large. In response to these problems, Professor Zhou Linjie, the core member of the research group, led the students to carry out in-depth research from the new mechanism and new process, and proposed a solution that combines a cascaded ring resonator with a reconfigurable optical switch delay network, using 60nm. The thickness of the ultra-thin silicon-based optical waveguide and the new optical switch structure break through the loss, device performance limitations, developed a 0~1.28 ns programmable optical delay universal chip, which can achieve continuous delay adjustment of broadband optical signals, and can pass Programmable implementation of optical time-division multiplexing, arbitrary waveform generation and filtering functions. This achievement was published in the flagship period of the American Optical Society (OSA). Optica '4(5): 507-515, 2017'. Compared with the highest level in the world, this chip has the advantages of low loss, large range of continuous adjustment, high stability, high resolution and high adjustment efficiency. Prof. Linjie Zhou is a winner of the National Outstanding Youth Fund. He was selected as one of the first batch of young Changjiang scholars. In 2016, he was awarded the title of Senior Newton Scholar of the Royal Society of England.