Review of 2 × 2 Silicon Photonic Switches

Abstract

With the advent of 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, Internet plus, and so on, data traffic is exploding and higher requirements are put forward for information transmission and switching. Traditional switching requires optical/electrical/optical conversions, which brings additional power consumption and requires the deployment of large amounts of cooling equipment. This increases the cost and complexity of the system. Moreover, limited by the electronic bottleneck, electrical switching will suffer from many problems such as bandwidth, delay, crosstalk, and so on, with the continuous reduction in device footprint. Optical switching does not require optical/electrical/optical conversions and has lower power consumption, larger capacity, and lower cost. Silicon photonic switches received much attention because of their compatibility with the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process and are anticipated to be potential candidates to replace electrical switches in many applications such as data center and telecommunication networks. 2 × 2 silicon photonic switches are the basic components to build the large-scale optical switching matrices. Thus, this review article mainly focuses on the principle and state of the art of 2 × 2 silicon photonic switches, including electro-optic switches, thermo-optic switches, and nonvolatile silicon photonic switches assisted by phase-change materials.