Silicon photonics platform for national security applications

We review Sandia's silicon photonics platform for national security applications. Silicon photonics offers the potential for extensive size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-c) reductions compared to existing III–V or purely electronics circuits. Unlike most silicon photonics foundries in the US and internationally, our silicon photonics is manufactured in a trusted environment at our Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Application (MESA) facility. The Sandia fabrication facility is certified as a trusted foundry and can therefore produce devices and circuits intended for military applications. We will describe a variety of silicon photonics devices and subsystems, including both monolithic and heterogeneous integration of silicon photonics with electronics, that can enable future complex functionality in aerospace systems, principally focusing on communications technology in optical interconnects and optical networking.