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SILICON PHOTONICS

The revolution of silicon photonics

Nature Materials volume 21, pages 974–975 (2022)Cite this article

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The success of silicon photonics is a product of two decades of innovations. This photonic platform is enabling novel research fields and novel applications ranging from remote sensing to ultrahigh-bandwidth communications. The future of silicon photonics depends on our ability to ensure scalability in bandwidth, size and power.

The idea of using silicon photonics for guiding, filtering and manipulating light was first explored in the 1980s1,2,3, but only in the past two decades, when the need for high-speed and low-power photonics arose, did the field become vibrant as we know it today. Silicon photonics originated from the need to overcome the main bottleneck of computing: increasing the input and output bandwidth of a silicon chip by several orders of magnitude and bringing it to the same level as the data bandwidth that is generated and processed on the chip while consuming minimal power4. Light is the ideal candidate for propagating high data rates with low power dissipation, as its frequency is much higher than the material resonances; therefore, its absorption is minimal. While the need for increasing interconnect bandwidth was high, the need for the optical technology to be compatible with the same materials and processes as the microelectronics — into which billions of dollars were already invested — was also high.

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Fig. 1: A silicon photonics chip.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical Engineering Department, Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Michal Lipson

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  1. Michal Lipson
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Correspondence to Michal Lipson.

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Competing interests

M.L. is a founder of Xscape, a shareholder of Voyant and a board member of POET— all developing products related to silicon photonics.

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Nature Materials thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Lipson, M. The revolution of silicon photonics. Nat. Mater. 21, 974–975 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01363-6

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