KIP-Veröffentlichungen

Jahr 2026
Autor(en) Yasen Yanev
Titel Characterisation of a Content Addressable Memory Realised on a Photonic Integrated Circuit
KIP-Nummer HD-KIP 26-57
KIP-Gruppe(n) F31
Dokumentart Bachelorarbeit
Abstract (en)

The exponential growth of data-intensive workloads, from network packet routing to machine- learning inference, has exposed the fundamental scaling limits of electronic content addressable memories (CAMs), whose lookup throughput is increasingly bottlenecked by interconnect delays and capacitive loading. Microring resonator-based photonic CAMs promise picosecond-scale parallel search by exploiting light’s inherent capacity for massive parallelism, yet existing demonstrations encode entire words within a single optical channel, capping storable memory at the free spectral range of the underlying resonators. Here we report the design, fabrication and characterisation of a network of four 4-bit silicon-photonic optical CAMs on the imec iSiPP50G platform, in which each microring resonator is tuned to one of two wavelengths to encode a single binary bit, decoupling memory capacity from spectral bandwidth. The 4 × 4 crossbar integrates microring memory cells, electroabsorption modulators and germanium photodetectors on a single chip, and is interfaced to a custom radio-frequency carrier board. All constituent devices meet or exceed published benchmarks, and end-to-end AC operation of the full optical signal chain is demonstrated. We identify thermal crosstalk, resonance drift and photocurrent non-uniformity as the dominant system-level limitations, and outline closed-loop stabilisation and per-column thresholding as concrete routes to a fully operational query, establishing a scalable architecture for read-intensive photonic memory search.

bibtex
@misc{4bitOCAMchar,
  author   = {Yasen Yanev},
  title    = {Characterisation of a Content Addressable Memory Realised on a Photonic Integrated Circuit},
  year     = {2026}
}
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