On the route towards a monolithically integrated silicon photonics

Optical interconnects become more and more essential because microelectronics has raised its fundamental bottleneck in terms of speed, packaging, fanout, and power dissipation. Besides hybrid approaches, which make the fabrication difficult and costly, a big research effort was aimed to render silicon an optical active material. In this paper the state of the art of the research carried out at Trento on the main “building block” towards a monolithically integrated silicon photonics is presented: the studies on optical gain in silicon nanocrystals to realize a light source, the Si lase