Silicon Photonics: a Scaling Technology for Communications and Interconnects

Silicon photonics exploits CMOS foundry processes to fabricate passive and active photonic circuits on silicon substrates. This technology offers superior scalability in terms of integration level and energy efficiency, two key metrics to obtain sustainable capacity growths in future telecom, datacom, and chip-scale interconnects. We illustrate the advantages of compactness and low power consumption by describing two novel silicon photonic based devices, namely, microring resonators and directly reflectivity modulated lasers.