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Photonic networks form the backbone for data communications. In particular, in current and future wireless communication systems, photonic networks are becoming increasingly popular for data distribution between the central office and the remote antenna units at base stations. As wireless-photonic systems become in increasing demand, low-cost implementation of such systems will be desirable. This paper describes how integrated photonics and electronics, on silicon, can be used to design such systems. Various building blocks of such silicon-photonics systems are reviewed. The emphasis is on a 60 GHz wireless system which could be suitable for the emerging 5th-generation (5G) cellular networks. The implementation discussed here uses digital baseband optical transmission as opposed to the radio-over-fibre approach.

Built around the Virtuoso® custom design platform, an electronic-photonic design environment has been developed, enabling schematic driven design for photonic and electronic circuits, photonic component parameter extraction and model generation, photonic circuit simulation and photonic mask layout implementation for monolithic and hybrid photonic circuits.

We present a novel design methodology for silicon photonic integrated circuits (PIC) that integrates Cadence's Spectre with Lumerical's INTERCONNECT. It supports parametric analysis of bidirectional, multi-mode PICs, with electrical feedback.

Considering inductors' large footprint in electronic-photonic integrated circuits, we implemented them in the lower cost photonic process instead of higher cost microelectronic process and improved their performance using a silicon etching technique.