Future prospects of silicon photonics in next generation communication and computing systems

Abstract

The recent progress is reviewed and future prospects of silicon photonics in next generation communication and computing systems are probed. Leveraging the many-billion-dollar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) industry, silicon photonics has promising prospects for realising very large-scale electronic and photonic integrated circuits with thousands of optical components and millions of transistors in the future to support very demanding integrated systems needs of next generation computing and communications. There are also a number of significant challenges in fulfilling such prospects. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009.