Sasikanth Manipatruni is an American engineer and inventor in the fields of Computer engineering, Integrated circuit technology, Materials Engineering and semiconductor device fabrication. Manipatruni contributed to developments in silicon photonics, spintronics and quantum materials.
Manipatruni is a co-author of 50 research papers and ~400 patents (cited about 7500 times ) in the areas of electro-optic modulators, Cavity optomechanics, nanophotonics & optical interconnects, spintronics, and new logic devices for extension of Moore's law. His work has appeared in Nature, Nature Physics, Nature communications, Science advances and Physical Review Letters.
Early life and education
Manipatruni received a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics from IIT Delhi in 2005 where he graduated with the institute silver medal. He also completed research under the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana at Indian Institute of Science working at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and in optimal control at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich.
Research career
Manipatruni received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering with minor in applied engineering physics from Cornell University. The title of his thesis was "Scaling silicon nanophotonic interconnects : silicon electrooptic modulators, slowlight & optomechanical devices". His thesis advisors were Michal Lipson and Alexander Gaeta at Cornell University. He has co-authored academic research with Michal Lipson, Alexander Gaeta, Keren Bergman, Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Lane W. Martin, Naresh Shanbhag, Jian-Ping Wang, Paul McEuen, Christopher J. Hardy, Felix Casanova, Ehsan Afshari, Alyssa Apsel, Jacob T. Robinson, :fr:Manuel Bibes spanning Condensed matter physics, Electronics and devices, Photonics, Circuit theory, Computer architecture and hardware for Artificial intelligence areas.
Silicon optical links
Manipatruni's PhD thesis was focused on developing the then nascent field of silicon photonics by progressively scaling the speed of electro-optic modulation from 1 GHz to 12.5 Gbit/s, 18 Gbit/s and 50 Gbit/s on a single physical optical channel driven by a silicon photonic component. The significance of silicon for optical uses can be understood as follows: nearly 95% of modern Integrated circuit technology is based on silicon-based semiconductors which have high productivity in Semiconductor device fabrication due to the use of large single crystal wafers and extraordinary control of the quality of the interfaces. However, Photonic integrated circuits are still majorly manufactured using III-V compound semiconductor materials and II-VI semiconductor compound materials, whose engineering lags silicon industry by several decades (judged by number of wafers and devices produced per year). By showing that silicon can be used as a material to turn light signal on and off, silicon electro-optic modulators allow for use of high-quality engineering developed for the electronics industry to be adopted for photonics/optics industry. This the foundational argument used by silicon electro-optics researchers. This work was paralleled closely at leading industrial research groups at Intel, IBM and Luxtera during 2005–2010 with industry adopting and improving various methods developed at academic research labs. Manipatruni's work showed that it is practically possible to develop free carrier injection modulators (in contrast to carrier depletion modulators) to reach high speed modulation by engineering injection of free carriers via pre-amplification and back-to-back connected injection mode devices.
In combination with Keren Bergman at Columbia University, micro-ring modulator research led to demonstration of a number of firsts in long-distance uses of silicon photonics utilizing silicon based injection mode electro-optic modulators including first demonstration of long-haul transmission using silicon microring modulators first Error-free transmission of microring-modulated BPSK, First Demonstration of 80-km Long-Haul Transmission of 12.5-Gb/s Data Using Silicon Microring Resonator Electro-Optic Modulator, First Experimental Bit-Error-Rate Validation of 12.5-Gb/s Silicon Modulator Enabling Photonic Networks-on-Chip. These academic results have been applied into products widely deployed at Cisco, Intel.