Silicon is a material with high refractive index characteristics in the near-infrared band. As early as the 1990s, silicon-based nano-scale waveguides have appeared in the form of a new type of nano-photonic devices, namely silicon photonic devices. Due to its small size, low cost, low power consumption, high-speed performance and compatibility with CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) manufacturing characteristics, silicon photonics technology has made significant progress in recent years. And with the explosive growth of current traffic in telecommunications and data communication networks, silicon photonic devices have attracted attention due to their superior performance such as low power consumption, wide bandwidth, and high transmission speed.
In fact, with the inclusion of planar lightwave circuit (PLC), arrayed waveguide grating (AWG), optical fiber amplifier (OFA), dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing (ROADM) and digital coherent technology, with the development of a number of key technologies, photoelectric integrated circuits based on III-V materials have been proposed in the 1980s, but they have not been able to achieve large-scale applications quickly.
The integration of all-photonic devices is based on silicon photonics. In recent years, silicon photonics has been widely used in telecommunications and data communications, including compact optical interconnect transceivers and new photonic switches in data centers and telecommunications networks.
Research highlights
Professor Kiyoshi Asakawa from the University of Tsukuba in Japan wrote a review article summarizing the history of silicon photonics innovation. In order to facilitate the understanding of a broad range of readers, including scientific research institutions, companies and enterprises, scientists, engineers, and university students, the article is divided into two parts, respectively, are a brief introduction to the basic characteristics of silicon photonics platforms, and their applications in two types of advanced photonic networks, telecommunications and data communications, so that readers have a more extensive and detailed understanding of the outstanding performance of silicon photonics devices and their applications in advanced application potential of photonic networks.
The overview also covers special applications of silicon photonics for advanced photonic signal processing networks, and solutions for current network requirements (such as low power consumption, wide bandwidth, and high transmission speed). This review will be of great help to photonic network engineers who want to challenge related issues and propose practical solutions to the explosive growth of photonic network traffic. In addition, the paper not only covers the characteristics and applications of silicon photonic devices, but also discusses CMOS-compatible nano-fabrication technology, so as to provide references for nanoelectronic CMOS process engineers who are currently opening up new markets for CMOS technology.
