Silicon photonics technologies for monolithic electronic-photonic integrated circuit applications

To overcome the severe information latency and power consumption, and enable significant parallelism based on a radically new communication landscape, instead of the conventional Cu-interconnect, will be a remarkable breakthrough. Converging electronic and photonic integrated circuits (EPIC) on a single chip platform to enable functional diversification emerges as one promising approach which could be realized by taking the advantage of low energy and huge data capacity of optical interconnects. By leveraging on the wealth of CMOS technology know-how and infrastructures, the fundamental photonics building blocks that are essential for the demonstration of EPIC platform have been successfully developed in this work. We present an overview on the current status of this critical technology development and provide an outlook for the monolithic integration of Si micro- and nano-photonics.