Development of silicon photonic devices for optical interconnects

Silicon photonic devices based on complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor(CMOS) compatible technologies have shown attractive performances on very-large-scale monolithic optoelectronic integration,high speed modulation and switching,and efficient off-chip optical coupling.This paper presents the recent progress on fast silicon optical modulation,wavelength-insensitive optical switching and efficient optical coupling techniques in our group.Several CMOS-compatible silicon optical couplers with different structures have been developed,showing the highest coupling efficiency of 65%.Broadband silicon-based optical switches with sub-nanosecond switching on-off time are experimentally realized.Silicon modulators with novel PN junctions are demonstrated with the speed up to 50 Gb s-1.