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Sub-Shot Noise Power Source for Microelectronics

Dmitry Strekalov, Nan Yu, Kamjou Mansour

Published Oct 1, 2011• 3 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Low-current, high-impedance microelectronic devices can be affected by electric current shot noise more than they are affected by Nyquist noise, even at room temperature. An approach to implementing a sub-shot noise current source for powering such devices is based on direct conversion of amplitude-squeezed light to photocurrent. The phenomenon of optical squeezing allows for the optical measurements below the fundamental shot noise limit, which would be impossible in the domain of classical optics. This becomes possible by affecting the statistical properties of photons in an optical mode, which can be considered as a case of information encoding. Once encoded, the information describing the photon (or any other elementary excitations) statistics can be also transmitted. In fact, it is such information transduction from optics to an electronics circuit, via photoelectric effect, that has allowed the observation of the optical squeezing. It is very difficult, if not technically impossible, to directly measure the statistical distribution of optical photons except at extremely low light level. The photoelectric current, on the other hand, can be easily analyzed using RF spectrum analyzers. Once it was observed that the photocurrent noise generated by a tested light source in question is below the shot noise limit (e.g. produced by a coherent light beam), it was concluded that the light source in question possess the property of amplitude squeezing. The main novelty of this technology is to turn this well-known information transduction approach around. Instead of studying the statistical property of an optical mode by measuring the photoelectron statistics, an amplitude-squeezed light source and a high-efficiency linear photodiode are used to generate photocurrent with sub-Poissonian electron statistics. By powering microelectronic devices with this current source, their performance can be improved, especially their noise parameters. Therefore, a room-temperature sub-shot noise current source can be built that will be beneficial for a very broad range of low-power, low-noise electronic instruments and applications, both cryogenic and room-temperature. Taking advantage of recent demonstrations of the squeezed light sources based on optical micro-disks, this sub-shot noise current source can be made compatible with the size/power requirements specific of the electronic devices it will support.

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Low-current, high-impedance microelectronic devices can be affected by electric current shot noise more than they are affected by Nyquist noise, even at room temperature. An approach to implementing a sub-shot noise current source for powering such devices is based on direct conversion of amplitude-squeezed light to photocurrent. The phenomenon of optical squeezing allows for the optical measurements below the fundamental shot noise limit, which would be impossible in the domain of classical optics. This becomes possible by affecting the statistical properties of photons in an optical mode, which can be considered as a case of information encoding. Once encoded, the information describing the photon (or any other elementary excitations) statistics can be also transmitted. In fact, it is such information transduction from optics to an electronics circuit, via photoelectric effect, that has allowed the observation of the optical squeezing. It is very difficult, if not technically impossible, to directly measure the statistical distribution of optical photons except at extremely low light level. The photoelectric current, on the other hand, can be easily analyzed using RF spectrum analyzers. Once it was observed that the photocurrent noise generated by a tested light source in question is below the shot noise limit (e.g. produced by a coherent light beam), it was concluded that the light source in question possess the property of amplitude squeezing. The main novelty of this technology is to turn this well-known information transduction approach around. Instead of studying the statistical property of an optical mode by measuring the photoelectron statistics, an amplitude-squeezed light source and a high-efficiency linear photodiode are used to generate photocurrent with sub-Poissonian electron statistics. By powering microelectronic devices with this current source, their performance can be improved, especially their noise parameters. Therefore, a room-temperature sub-shot noise current source can be built that will be beneficial for a very broad range of low-power, low-noise electronic instruments and applications, both cryogenic and room-temperature. Taking advantage of recent demonstrations of the squeezed light sources based on optical micro-disks, this sub-shot noise current source can be made compatible with the size/power requirements specific of the electronic devices it will support.
We drive a high-efficiency gallium arsenide light emitting diode (LED) with a low-noise current and measure the noise in the detected photocurrent from a high-quantum-efficiency silicon photodiode collecting most of the emitted light. The drive current is obtained from a resistor in series with a low-noise voltage supply. The Johnson noise in the current is much less than shot noise whenever the voltage across the resistor is large compared with 50 mV (2kT/e at room temperature). The LED converts electrons to photons directly with some efficiency η.
The optical shot-noise limit of a laser beam represents the classical limit in precision and signal to noise ratio achievable in optical sensors and imaging systems. It is known that quantum states of light, such as squeezed light and quantum correlated twin beams can be used to enhance precision and signal to noise ratio to beyond this limit. This promises optical sensors with fundamentally superior performance to the state of the art. While quantum-enhanced signal to noise ratio has been demonstrated with macroscopic powers of squeezed probe beam, demonstrations of quantum enhanced precision have remained at extremely low powers of light (femto-Watts). Here we will give examples where increasing SNR with quantum light is not sufficient to increase precision and we will review proof of principle experiments that have demonstrated sub shot noise precision, including for absorption spectroscopy and imaging. We will also report our efforts to achieve this sub-shot-noise precision performance for transmission measurement with ~0.1mW of average probe power, equating to ~10W peak power in a pulsed experiment. Time permitting, we will discuss how integrated optics and integrated electronics enables 10s GHz bandwidth in the detection of squeezed light, for integrated quantum sensor technology.
Summary form only given. Generally, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are considered to be low-performance devices in comparison with laser diodes (LDs). However, for future applications such as the parallel inter- or intra-integrated-circuit chip optical-connections, where very low power-consumption is required for the light emitters, a LED can be a very attractive device because of the threshold-free input-output characteristics. So far, continuous efforts have been made to improve the performance of LEDs. In this paper, we focus on another very important aspect, i.e. the noise characteristics. In comparison with LDs, in general, LEDs exhibit excellent noise characteristics, particularly at low injection levels. We show that the intensity fluctuation of the output light from an LED can be squeezed below the full shot-noise (FSN) level in a wide frequency range up to 800 MHz at room temperature. Such a squeezing bandwidth, three orders of magnitude wider than that in the first report on shot-noise suppression in a LED and rather close to the widest bandwidth (1.1 GHz) obtained with LDs at 77 K has been believed to be impossible. In addition, use of a separate confinement hetero(SCH-) structure in the active region allowed us to use a moderate doping concentration (5 /spl times/ 10/sup 18/ cm/sup -3/), resulting in a sufficiently high internal quantum efficiency, /spl sim/30%.
Amplitude fluctuations in the light from a laser and the partition noise attributable to a beam splitter are analyzed using an equivalent-circuit model that incorporates amplitude squeezing. When the energy is not carried by photons but by electrons and also when electrons can be treated as classical particles, the circuit model need not be changed. One simply applies the general circuit model to low frequencies h\ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\ll}kB{\mathit{k}}_{\mathit{B}}kB​T. Conversion of an electric current to photon flux, and vice versa, converts classical sub-shot-noise spectra of electric currents into quantum squeezing of photon fluxes, and vice versa. The sub-shot-noise character of electric currents, unlike that of quantum squeezing, is not necessarily destroyed by current loss.
The squeezing of the intensity noise in the extremely weak light emanating from a light-emitting diode (LED) was investigated. By the use of a tailor-made high-efficiency LED, in which the active region is heavily doped (∼3.5×1019 cm-3), we successfully observed sub-Poissonian light at an injection current and photocurrent as low as 1 µA and 160 nA, respectively, at room temperature. The experimental results also implied that the theoretical model describing the noise behavior needs to be refined, particularly in the case of extremely low injection levels where the nonradiative recombination process has a serious effect.