Recent advances in strained silicon devices for enabling electro-optical functionalities

More than ten years ago it was demonstrated that the Pockels effect could be feasible by breaking the crystal symmetry of silicon. Since then, strained silicon devices have been developed by means of a highly stressing cladding layer (typically silicon nitride, SiN) deposited on top of the silicon waveguide. However, it has been recently shown that carrier effects could play a significant role and the induced Pockels effect could have been overestimated. In this work, we will review the recent advances in the field and we will present our last results showing that there is also a strong influence of the interface traps on the electro-optical response.