Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits

Silicon photonics is a disruptive optical technology that will achieve low-cost and compact optical modules for data communications, with applications such as chip-scale optical interconnects, short-reach communications in datacenters and supercomputers, and metro/long-haul coherent optical transmissions. Here, we review the technical merits of silicon photonic devices and integrated circuits, which have benefited from high-index-contrast silicon waveguides, a high integration level of various optical functions on the same chips, and mature complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication techniques. In particular, we review silicon photonic circuits for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmitters, WDM receivers, coherent optical transmitters and coherent receivers, photonic networks-on-chip, and silicon photonic light sources. The remaining challenges will be already discussed.