Silicon Microphotonics: Hardware for the Information Age

Summary form only given. The optical components industry stands at the threshold of a major expansion that will restructure its business processes and sustain its profitability for the next three decades. This growth will establish a cost effective platform for the partitioning of electronic and photonic functionality to extend the processing power of integrated circuits and the performance of optical communications networks. The traditional dimensional shrink approach to the scaling of microprocessor technology is encountering barriers in materials and power dissipation that dictate more distributed, parallel architectures. As short link interconnection capacity crosses the 10 Mb/s km thresholds that dictate optical carrier utilization, a high volume silicon-based platform is required. The platform enables smart partitioning of electronic and photonic signal processing to give extended functionality to silicon CMOS technology. The talk gives an overview of the evolving silicon microphotonics technology platform: materials, components and monolithic integration; and assess its ability to meet the processing, interconnection and high volume production challenges in the next phase of the information age