Silicon photonics

Silicon photonics is rapidly gaining importance as a generic technology platform for a wide range of applications in telecom, datacom, interconnect and sensing. It allows to implement photonic functions in or above silicon through the use of wafer-scale technologies normally used for advanced CMOS-processing. In recent years there has been a plethora of breakthroughs in this field, including the demonstration of ultra-compact passive optical functions, high speed optical modulators and detectors, silicon lasers, all-optical signal processing functions, etc. One of the exciting new directions is the wafer-scale heterogeneous integration of III-V materials with silicon