FRAMEWORK OF SILICON PHOTONICS

Abstract: Earlier, Scientists used to perform various research on discovering an alternative for copper wires which are used for data transfer between the microchips but now we have found that replacement by using silicon as an optical medium. We simply replace the original electronic circuits with photonic circuits. The future of IC industry depends upon the speed and bandwidth requirements, but in metallic interconnections we have constraints on speed as well as bandwidth. This is a key enabling factor of bringing photonics to technology areas where the costs of implementation using other methods is expensive. Silicon photonics provides us with low-cost approach for overcoming the bottleneck of the high data transmission rate. Silicon photonics is attention-seeking technology that is revolutionizing in several application areas like computing, data centers, sensing. The main objective behind using silicon photonics is that CMOS-like fabrication ability it provides resulting in high-volume production that too in low cost. It is clear that silicon photonics has a dazzling future. This paper provides an overview of the progress and the growth of each component in silicon photonics, including modulators, detectors, and lasers compared to last few years.

Keywords: Silicon, semiconductor fabrication, waveguides, avalanche photodiodes, Mach-Zehnder (MZ).