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.