Silicon Photonics: a Scaling Technology for Communications and Interconnects

Silicon photonics exploits CMOS processes to fabricate passive and active photonic circuits on silicon substrates. Its various technical merits implies that this technology can offer superior scalability in terms of integration level and energy efficiency for optical links, two key perspectives to fulfill sustainable capacity growths in future telecom, datacom, and chip-scale interconnects. We highlight the advantages of compactness and low power consumption from two novel silicon photonic devices, namely, microring resonators and directly reflectivity modulated lasers.