Advanced silicon device technologies for optical interconnects

Silicon photonics is an emerging technology offering novel solutions in different areas requiring highly integrated communication systems for optical networking, sensing, bio-applications and computer interconnects. Silicon photonicsbased communication has many advantages over electric wires for multiprocessor and multicore macro-chip architectures including high bandwidth data transmission, high speed and low power consumption. Following the INTEL's concept to "siliconize" photonics, silicon device technologies should be able to solve the fabrication problems for six main building blocks for realization of optical interconnects: light generation, guiding of light including wavelength selectivity, light modulation for signal encoding, detection, low cost assembly including optical connecting of the devices to the real world and finally the electronic control systems.