• Sub-0.1 µm and beyond CMOS technology development
   

Although advancement of CMOS technology during the last three decades has dramatically improved our daily life in almost every aspect, it has encountered increasing technical challenges in continuous miniaturization down to sub-0.1 µm and beyond. GNS's research and development team focusing on technologies of 5-30 years in the future, drives the advancement of its high-performance CMOS technologies to smaller geometries and higher performance. Research programs are focused on providing near-term and long-term solutions to the most challenging issues facing semiconductor industry such as, high dielectric constant materials, advanced gate stacks, floating gates, advanced silicide technology, advanced lithography, vertical transistors, strained silicon and other novel device structures.

• CMOS-compatible monolithic optoelectronics
   

Monolithic integration of photonics with electronics on a single substrate is highly desirable. Optical devices have always been the realm of exotic III-V materials such as indium, gallium and so forth, whose fabrication is incompatible to advanced electronics of silicon. The GNS scientists seek to provide monolithic integration strategies of photonics devices and subsystems on a single silicon substrate, made of III-V materials, silicon, silicon, and/or Si-based materials for high speed data communication and signal processing.

• Si-based nanophotonics for data communication and signal processing
   

Photonic integrated circuits, in which beams of light redirect the flow of other beams of light, are a long-standing goal for developing highly integrated optical data communication and signal processing systems. In addition, Si-based photonic integrated circuits are more desirable because it is cheaper, more abundant, and easier to work with as opposed to III-V materials. GNS and its partners research and develop novel Si-based active and passive components and subsystems toward all-optical data communication and signal processing, i.e. silicon nanophotonics. They include but not limited to Si-based light emitting diodes, lasers, photo detectors, modulators, amplifiers, switches, waveguides, bends, couplers, combiners, splitters, wavelength division multiplexers, and so forth.