International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE) Vol. 6, No. 6, December 2016, pp. 2708~2715 ISSN: 2088-8708, DOI: 10.11591/ijece.v6i6.12056  2708 Journal homepage: http://iaesjournal.com/online/index.php/IJECE Optical Interconnect Waveguide in Electronic Circuit Siti Sarah Binti Md Sallah 1 , Sawal Hamid Md Ali 2 , Nurjuliana Binti Juhari 3 , P. Sushitha Menon 4 , Md Shabiul Islam 5 1,2 Faculty of Engineering and Build Environment (FKAB), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia 3 School of Microelectronic Engineering, Universiti Malaysia Perlis, Malaysia 4 Institute of Microengineering and Nanoelectronics (IMEN), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 5 Faculty of Engineering, Multimedia University (Cyberjaya), Malaysia Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Aug 4, 2016 Revised Oct 19, 2016 Accepted Nov 2, 2016 The increasing demand in silicon nano-photonics has encouraged many researchers to put more efforts to explore the feasibility of using optics in the communication medium in order to replace the conventional electrical interconnects (EIs). In this paper, we proposed a SOI- based waveguide in the optical interconnect (OI) link at an operating frequency of 1550nm to work as an interconnection path in a circuit. The performance capability of the OI link was tested using a two-stage CE amplifier to work as the interconnection path from the 1st stage to the 2nd stage amplifier. In term of optical performances, the optical waveguide interconnect managed to achieve a single mode condition for a TE mode and fulfill the receiver sensitivity of a photodiode. While, in term of electrical performance, a two-stage CE amplifier is able to produce a high gain, a wide bandwidth and high slew rate. The proposed implementation of the OIs waveguide is succesfully enhance the performance of the two-stage CE amplifier as well as the analog electronic circuit applications. Keyword: Electrical interconnect Optical interconnect Optical waveguide Two-stage CE amplifier Copyright © 2016 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. Corresponding Author: Siti Sarah Binti Md Sallah, Sawal Hamid Md Ali, Faculty of Engineering and Build Environment (FKAB), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi-43600, Selangor, Malaysia. Email: sitisarah.mdsallah@gmail.com, sawal@ukm.edu.my 1. INTRODUCTION Interconnects in the integrated circuit (IC) are used to connect transistors and other electronic components on a chip [1]. The performance of the conventional copper interconnects degrades substantially due to the scaling dimensions in the Complementrary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology [2]. According to International Technology Roadmaps for Semiconductor (ITRS), the circuits to be manufactured in the nanometer scale will contain more than a billion transistors [3] and causing the requirement of large number of interconnects [4]. Therefore, the optical interconnects (OIs) have been considered as an alternative solution for the electrical interconnects (EIs) [5]. Moreover, silicon nano-photonics is a key technology for realizing that such optical components can be fabricated with Si CMOS compatible device processes [6]. The advantage of OI link compared to EIs is able to provide a high bandwidth density, minimizing lower power consumption, as well as decreasing interconnect delays and noise [7-11]. The theory of OI was introduced by Goodman in 1984 [12]. Figure 1 shows the basic block diagram of OI link on a very large scale integrated (VLSI) electronic circuit. The main components of OI are off- chip CW source, modulator, an optical waveguide and a photodetector. The most famous waveguide material are Polymer [13], Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) [14] and Indium Gallium Arsenide Phosphide (InGaAsP). The applications of OI technology are in the computer system, mobile devices, as well as other electronic circuit systems.