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Towards fabless silicon photonics

Nature Photonics volume 4, pages 492–494 (2010)Cite this article

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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.

Over the past decade, the silicon photonics community has made fantastic progress in implementing a wide variety of optical and electro-optical devices in silicon. Today, academic groups, start-up companies and large semiconductor manufacturers are all competing against each other to demonstrate, publish and commercialize the best silicon photonic devices. All of the constituent components of a photonic data transmission system built on electronics-compatible silicon wafers — including laser sources, modulators, detectors, waveguides and filters — have already been demonstrated1.

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Michael Hochberg and Tom Baehr-Jones are at the Nanophotonics Lab, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA.,

    Michael Hochberg & Tom Baehr-Jones

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  1. Michael Hochberg
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  2. Tom Baehr-Jones
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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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