Abstract
AbstractThe tremendous growth of data traffic has spurred a rapid evolution of optical communications for a higher data transmission capacity. Next-generation fiber-optic communication systems will require dramatically increased complexity that cannot be obtained using discrete components. In this context, silicon photonics is quickly maturing. Capable of manipulating electrons and photons on the same platform, this disruptive technology promises to cram more complexity on a single chip, leading to orders-of-magnitude reduction of integrated photonic systems in size, energy, and cost. This paper provides a system perspective and reviews recent progress in silicon photonics probing all dimensions of light to scale the capacity of fiber-optic networks toward terabits-per-second per optical interface and petabits-per-second per transmission link. Firstly, we overview fundamentals and the evolving trends of silicon photonic fabrication process. Then, we focus on recent progress in silicon coherent optical transceivers. Further scaling the system capacity requires multiplexing techniques in all the dimensions of light: wavelength, polarization, and space, for which we have seen impressive demonstrations of on-chip functionalities such as polarization diversity circuits and wavelength- and space-division multiplexers. Despite these advances, large-scale silicon photonic integrated circuits incorporating a variety of active and passive functionalities still face considerable challenges, many of which will eventually be addressed as the technology continues evolving with the entire ecosystem at a fast pace.
Highlights
Global Internet traffic has been growing exponentially over the past 20 years [1,2,3,4]
The demand for low-cost, integrated solutions in optical communications has been a major driving force behind the emergence and rapid development of silicon photonics. This disruptive technology will continue evolving at a fast pace in the decade to support the scaling of capacity of fiber-optic transmission systems
In the few years, commercial Tb/s silicon photonic transceivers will be available for various distances ranging from hundreds meters to thousands of kilometers for a vast diversity of application scenarios including intradata and interdata center interconnects, 5G access networks, terrestrial optical transport networks, and submarine cables
Summary
Global Internet traffic has been growing exponentially over the past 20 years [1,2,3,4]. Assuming each of the transceivers delivers 1 Tb/s, a 1 Pb/s system consisting of 1000 subchannels (e.g., 100 wavelengths × 10 spatial paths) will require 4000 modulators and 8000 photodetectors (4 modulators and 4 balanced photodetectors for dualpolarization quadrature) and a large number of other active and passive components (e.g., wavelength and mode (de-)multiplexers, variable optical attenuators (VOAs), splitters/combiners, couplers, polarization splitters and rotators, etc.) All these components can be integrated on silicon chips, either monolithically or in a hybrid manner. IR applications [43, 44] but beyond the scope of this paper
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