Recent progress of silicon photonics
Abstract
As people urgently require more information capacity, higher speed and lower cost, silicon photonics become a hot topic and very promising key technologies in optical communications and high-speed computers fields. Silicon photonics is a kind of technology to fabricate optoelectronic devices on silicon platform by using standard CMOS integrated circuit. The cost, power consumption, and size of devices can be reduced significantly using the investment, facilities, and experience of CMOS integrated circuit design, manufacturing, packaging, integration, and scalability. In recent years, silicon photonics has developed to a new stage, many key components have reached commercial standards, the part of performance is even higher than current commercial devices. In this paper, we introduce the recenct major breakthrough of silicon photonics, includinig some key components, waveguides, gratings, polarization beam splitters, mixers, filters, modulators, detectors and lasers. Finally, silicon photoncis future development direction and challenges are presented briefly.
