Silicon Photonics and Photonic Integrated Circuits

- Overview

Silicon photonics (SiPh) is a material platform that allows for the creation of photonic integrated circuits (PICs). PICs are devices that integrate many optical and sometimes electronic components. SiPh uses silicon on insulator (SOI) wafers as the semiconductor substrate material and can use most standard CMOS manufacturing processes.

SiPh is a technology that combines high density PICs with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) electronics fabrication. The substrate material used to fabricate PICs can determine some of the technology's limitations and features. PICs are often fabricated using wafer-scale technology, which involves lithography, on substrates made of silicon, silica, or a nonlinear crystal material like lithium niobate (LiNbO3). 

PICs have many applications, including: data communications, sensing, biomedical applications, defense and aerospace industries, and astronomy.

Please refer to the following for more information:

• Wikipedia: Silicon Photonics (SiPh)
• Wikipedia: Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs)

- Integrated Photonics

Integrated Photonics, the use of light for applications traditionally addressed through electronics, is finding use in a wide range of areas including: telecommunications, laser-based radar, data communications, sensing, and many others. Integrated photonics, specifically silicon photonics, dramatically improves on the performance and reliability of electronic integrated circuits while significantly reducing size, weight, and power consumption.

Developing a widely accepted set of processes and protocols for the design, manufacture, and integration of photonics systems will not only advance this technology in the United States, but also present a tremendous economic opportunity. Integrated photonics will enable the advancement of the aforementioned applications, as well as others, in the 21st century in the same manner that semiconductor microchips fostered the revolution in computing over the past 40 years.

- Graphene-Silicon Photonics

Graphene is an ideal material for optoelectronic applications. Its photonic properties give several advantages and complementarities over Si photonics. For example, graphene enables both electro-absorption and electro-refraction modulation with an electro-optical index change exceeding 10⁻³. It can be used for optical add–drop multiplexing with voltage control, eliminating the current dissipation used for the thermal detuning of microresonators, and for thermoelectric-based ultrafast optical detectors that generate a voltage without transimpedance amplifiers. 

[More to come ...]