Silicon photonics

Abstract

Summary form only given. The convergence of electronics and photonics in a monolithic silicon platform brings about unprecedented information processing capacity. Silicon photonics yields a scalable solution to the anticipated barriers of interconnection bandwidth and latency, input/output density, and electronics/photonics partitioning. This is further propelled by our theoretical understanding of optical nanostructures from first-principles and by successes in nanoscale optical device nanofabrication, from which we can now practically prescribe the properties of synthetic optical nanostructures. We discuss a specific example of a silicon optical nanostructure, which exhibits the possibility of large-scale CMOS deployment of the resulting silicon nanophotonics technology.