ABSTRACT
The inception of a silicon photonic manufacturing and design ecosystem represents a crucial difference between past and present work on brain-inspired optical signal processing. A silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) ecosystem built for inter-core communication links in traditional computers could therefore lower key barriers for ideas in large scale optical signal processing. The combination of performance, manufacturability, and widespread demand make silicon photonics a very promising mainstream PIC standard. In the horizontal direction, ribs are effectively total internal reflection waveguides, but are not as strongly confining as their strip counterparts because the cladding effective index is between that of silicon and air. Passive self-alignment strategies based on wet etched V-grooves in the silicon die have also been explored to vastly reduce the cost and time to attach fiber arrays. Thermal modulators consisting of a heater filament separated from the silicon waveguide by a thick dielectric layer are the simplest to fabricate.
