History and Current Status

Abstract

Silicon is a material used in the microelectronics industry. In the mid-1980s, Soref et al. proposed photonic integration by employing silicon waveguide devices on chips. Enabled by advanced manufacturing facilities, the past two decades witnessed a rapid growth of silicon photonics in academic research and industrial commercialization. This field has received tremendous interest as silicon offers a platform that is compatible with complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor manufacturing, enabling high density integration, low power consumption, high volume, and low cost. After its success in telecom and datacom areas, silicon photonics is still booming and is being adopted by other non-telecom fields. The applications of silicon photonics have extended to beam steering, biosensing, quantum information processing, spectroscopy, gyroscopes, etc. In this chapter, we first review the development of silicon photonics from proposals to practical implementations. Then, we describe the current status of passive silicon photonic devices that operate on wavelength, polarization, and space dimensions.