Abstract
Silicon Photonics, the technology where optical devices are fabricated by the mainstream microelectronic processing technology, was proposed almost 30 years ago. I joined this research field at its start. Initially, I concentrated on the main issue of the lack of a silicon laser. Room temperature visible emission from porous silicon first, and from silicon nanocrystals then, showed that optical gain is possible in low-dimensional silicon, but it is severely counterbalanced by nonlinear losses due to free carriers. Then, most of my research focus was on systems where photons show novel features such as Zener tunneling or Anderson localization. Here, the game was to engineer suitable dielectric environments (e.g., one-dimensional photonic crystals or waveguide-based microring resonators) to control photon propagation. Applications of low-dimensional silicon raised up in sensing (e.g., gas-sensing or bio-sensing) and photovoltaics. Interestingly, microring resonators emerged as the fundamental device for integrated photonic circuit since they allow studying the hermitian and non-hermitian physics of light propagation as well as demonstrating on-chip heavily integrated optical networks for reconfigurable switching applications or neural networks for optical signal processing. Finally, I witnessed the emergence of quantum photonic devices, where linear and nonlinear optical effects generate quantum states of light. Here, quantum random number generators or heralded single-photon sources are enabled by silicon photonics. All these developments are discussed in this review by following my own research path.
Highlights
Silicon is the material on which microelectronics industry has been built
Millions of silicon photonic transceivers operating at data rates equal to or larger than 100 Gbps are annually sold [244]
Co-packaged optics, where both the silicon-photonic transceivers and the silicon electronic switches are packaged in a single board for networking data centers [22], have demonstrated aggregated data rate of 25 Tbps and higher [245]
Summary
Silicon is the material on which microelectronics industry has been built. At the end of the eighties, the semiconductor industry was betting on III-V materials for the development of optoelectronic devices and high-speed electronics. A young British scientist demonstrated that quantum confinement in silicon allows getting visible room-temperature luminescence with high quantum efficiency [1] This result pushed a large international effort toward light-emitting silicon [2] in an effort to make silicon an active optoelectronic material and, to replace III-V semiconductors. I have contributed to silicon photonics with my own work here and reviewed and followed the field by editing few books [4,5,6,7,8,9] and handbooks [10, 11]. Since this review of silicon photonics is quite a personal history and a story of my contributions to the field, almost all the cited works refer to my own papers.
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