Recent Advances in Modelling and Simulation of Silicon Photonic Devices

Abstract

Nowadays, the interest for a large number of topics in Photonics research field is very high and of increasing importance (Reed, 2004), (Reed & Knights, 2004). A very important Silicon technology Company as Intel Corp. is developing many research programs in Photonics, with the aim to use silicon as a fundamental technological platform for all the photonic functions in any telecommunications system link (including generation, modulation, filtering, wavelength conversion, switching, amplification and detection of light). In fact, silicon low cost, vast existing microelectronics infrastructure and its technology allowing large integration of electronic and photonic devices, make Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technological platform a very attractive prospective for Photonics. Silicon photonics most promising applications are in the fields of optical interconnects, low-cost telecommunications and optical sensors. Optical interconnects have been demonstrated as very important because they permit to achieve a significant bandwidth increase in a variety of application areas including rack-to-rack, board-to-board, chip-to-chip and intrachip applications. SOI optical interconnects may permit to overcome the bandwidth limitations due to frequency-dependent losses imposed by copper interconnects. Actually, employment of electronic and optical microand nano-sensors in a great number of application fields such as medicine, microbiology, particle physics, automotive, environmental safety and defence is receiving an increasing interest. Sensor and actuator monolithic integration in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMSs), nano-electromechanical systems (NEMSs) and micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMSs) has been achieved in a great number of sensing devices. Photonic sensors have attracted a great attention because of their immunity to electromagnetic interference, good compactness and robustness and high compatibility with fibre networks, but also because they usually exhibit shorter response time and higher sensitivities with respect to MEMS/MOEMS devices. Different integrated optical chemical and biochemical sensors have been proposed adopting prevalently CMOS-compatible technological platforms. Thus, the tasks of modelling and simulation of photonic devices and systems is becoming as more and more significant. However, a large number of modelling techniques for Photonics is not yet well standardized and many aspects of simulation tasks are still open. In general, different well known modelling techniques include beam propagation methods (BPM),