Flexi Card Game: A Design Toolkit for Unconventional Communication Systems for Long-Distance Relationships

In postmodern times of emphasized fluidification, individualism and cosmopolitanism, mobility becomes self-evident and naturalized, yet socially desirable and anticipated. Therefore it is valuable to use ethnography to look at individual experiences. They are young, educated, and mobile, pursuing their dreams and goals while living in big cities: Poles and other (not only) European citizens who maintain transnational long-distance relationships create perfectly suitable representatives of the category of ‘privileged mobility’. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2016–2018, and it employs an auto-ethnographic perspective in order to examine the notion of privilege (Amit 2007), with its borders and limitations, through the analytical lens of mobility. The article puts forward the perspective of my research participants and thus provides a detailed portrait of the researched group, in order to show how mobility is rooted in their everyday lives and how privileged they really are. I argue that mobility, defined as one of the most stratifying factors (Bourdieu 1984), can be applied as a mirror that reflects position in the social strata. In this specific ethnographic context, spatial mobility can be seen as a useful tool, which exposes social and individual dimensions of being privileged while living in transnational long-distance relationships

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Integrated silicon carbide modulator for CMOS photonics

10.21203/rs.3.rs-178354/v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Keith Powell ◽

Liwei Li ◽

Amirhassan Shams-Ansari ◽

Jianfu Wang ◽

Debin Meng ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Silicon Carbide ◽

Communication Systems ◽

Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor ◽

Optical Signal ◽

Oxide Semiconductor ◽

Photon Absorption ◽

Stable Operation ◽

Pockels Effect ◽

Long Distance ◽

Optical Carrier

Abstract The electro-optic modulator encodes electrical signals onto an optical carrier, and is essential for the operation of global communication systems and data centers that society demands. An ideal modulator results from scalable semiconductor fabrication and is integrable with electronics. Accordingly, it is compatible with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication processes. Moreover, modulators using the Pockels effect enables low loss, ultrafast, and wide-bandwidth data transmission. Although strained silicon-based modulators could satisfy these criteria, fundamental limitations such as two-photon absorption, poor thermal stability and a narrow transparency window hinder their performance. On the other hand, as a wide bandgap semiconductor material, silicon carbide is CMOS compatible and does not suffer from these limitations. Due to its combination of color centers, high breakdown voltage, and strong thermal conductivity, silicon carbide is a promising material for CMOS electronics and photonics with applications ranging from sensors to quantum and nonlinear photonics. Importantly, silicon carbide exhibits the Pockels effect, but a modulator has not been realized since the discovery of this effect more than three decades ago. Here we design, fabricate, and demonstrate the first Pockels modulator in silicon carbide. Specifically, we realize a waveguide-integrated, small form-factor, gigahertz-bandwidth modulator that can operate using CMOS-level drive voltages on a thin film of silicon carbide on insulator. Furthermore, the device features no signal degradation and stable operation at high optical intensities (913 kW/mm2), allowing for high optical signal-to-noise ratios for long distance communications. Our work unites Pockels electro-optics with a CMOS platform to pave the way for foundry-compatible integrated photonics.

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