Silicon photonic network-on-chip and enabling components

As the transistor’s feature scales down and the integration density of the monolithic circuit increases continuously, the traditional metal interconnects face significant performance limitation to meet the stringent demands of high-speed, low-power and low-latency data transmission for on- and off-chip communications. Optical technology is poised to resolve these problems. Due to the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) compatible process, silicon photonics is the leading candidate technology. Silicon photonic devices and networks have been improved dramatically in recent years, with a notable increase in bandwidth from the megahertz to the multi-gigahertz regime in just over half a decade. This paper reviews the recent developments in silicon photonics for optical interconnects and summarizes the work of our laboratory in this research field.