The UK silicon photonics project

The project is a consortium based activity involving researchers from the UK institutions of the Universities of Surrey, St. Andrews, Leeds, Warwick, and Southampton, as well as the commercial research institution QinetiQ. The aims of the project are to progress the state of the art in Silicon Photonics, in the areas of waveguides, modulators, couplers, detectors, Raman processes, and integration with electronics. Thus the field is vast, and impossible to cover comprehensively in one project, nor indeed in one paper. The programme is run on a truly collaborative basis, with members from each institution running one or more work packages within the project, each co-ordinating work from their own plus other institutions. To date, the most well developed work has emerged from the activity on basic waveguides and their characteristics, the modulator activity, optical filters, and work on Raman Amplifiers. This work will be the main focus of this paper, but an attempt will be made to update the audience on the remaining activities within the project. By the nature of the project, much of the work is medium term, and hence some activities are not expected to yield viable results until at least next year, hence the concentration on some activities rather than all activities at this stage