Editorial Introduction to JSTQE Issue on Silicon Photonics

The papers in this special section focus on silicon photonics. Silicon photonics has rapidly grown from a promising academic field to an industrial reality, with many silicon photonics-based products deployed in the field. The success of this fairly young field, which took its first steps in the 1990s, can be attributed to two unique characteristics of the technology: the scaling down of waveguides, and the scaling up of manufacturing. Silicon, as a semiconductor material, has a high refractive index, and a native oxide with a much lower refractive index. This makes it possible to confine light in submicrometer waveguides with tight bends, which can then be integrated by the thousands on the surface of a small chip.