Silicon Photonic Integrated Devices for Datacenter Optical Networks

The evolution of computing infrastructure and workloads has put an enormous pressure on datacenter networks. It is expected that bandwidth will scale without increases in the network power envelope and total cost of ownership. Networks based on silicon photonic devices promise to help alleviate these problems, but a viable development path for these technologies is not yet fully outlined. In this paper, we report our progress on developing components and strategies for datacenter silicon photonics networks. We will focus on recent progress on compact, low-threshold hybrid Si lasers and the CWDM transceivers based on these lasers as well as DWDM microring resonator-based transceivers.