ABSTRACT
Silicon (Si) photonics is the prime candidate to cover the application range at the border region between pure electrical and pure optical solutions. The essential property of planar Si waveguides is due to their high refractive index contrast when fabricated on silicon-on-insulator substrates. Active devices in photonics for emission, detection, and absorption modulation need strong light-matter interaction in the selected infrared transmission regime. This needs a different material for the active devices that should provide a strong light-matter interaction at the selected wavelength regime but with a good transparency of the Si waveguides. The envisaged application spectrum of Si photonics started with telecommunication networks in metro areas and then expanded to data center and cloud service, to on-chip clock distribution, and to links between cores of multicore processors and links between core and memories. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
