Optical Interconnects Using Plasmonics and Si-Photonics

Optical interconnects have continued to experience significant advances during the last year, exploiting mainly relevant progress in silicon photonics technologies. This year has also marked the first attempts toward integrating silicon photonics with plasmonics and enabling the introduction of the small-size power-effective plasmonic structures in true interconnect applications. The first successful silicon-plasmonic coupling configurations have been reported, and switching by miniaturized thermo-optic plasmonic modules has been realized, resulting in the first efforts for high-throughput on-chip silicon-plasmonic router architectures.