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Towards fabless silicon photonics

Silicon photonic devices can be built using commercial CMOS chip fabrication facilities, or 'fabs'. However, nearly all research groups continue to design, build and test chips internally, rather than leveraging shared CMOS foundry infrastructure.

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Figure 1: Complexity in silicon photonics.

ALEXANDER SPOTT/UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

Figure 2: Over the past decade, the complexity of chip-scale integrated silicon photonic systems has approximately doubled every year.

ALEXANDER SPOTT/UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

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Acknowledgements

M.H. acknowledges support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigators Program and from G. Pomrenke, the Presidential Early Career Award Program Manager. M.H. and T.B.-J. thank A. Spott for editorial assistance. M.H. thanks H. Bubb, C. Mead, B. Otis and R. B. Darling for valuable correspondence.

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Correspondence to Michael Hochberg.

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Hochberg, M., Baehr-Jones, T. Towards fabless silicon photonics. Nature Photon 4, 492–494 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2010.172

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