Merits and potential impact of silicon photonics

Abstract

In this chapter, we review the technical merits of silicon photonic devices and integrated circuits, which have benefited from high-index-contrast silicon waveguides, a high integration level of various optical functions on the same chip, and mature complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication techniques. These technical merits assure silicon photonics as a disruptive optical technology that will achieve low-cost and compact optical modules for data communications, with applications such as chip-scale optical interconnects, short-reach communications in datacenters and supercomputers, and metro/long-haul optical transmissions. We discuss various applications in these fields, which may benefit from implementation in silicon photonics. In particular, we review silicon photonic circuits for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmitters, WDM receivers, coherent optical transmitters and coherent receivers, which all require photonic integration to reduce the cost and module size.