Silicon Photonic 2.5D/3D Integration Technology and Its Applications

With the explosive growth of global network traffic and the consequent increase in bandwidth and energy consumption required for data transmission, traditional electronic interconnection architectures are no longer able to meet the requirement of the growing bandwidth and energy conservation. Silicon-based photonics featured as high bandwidth, low energy consumption, and more importantly, compatibility with Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technologies enables the large-scale Photonic Integrated Circuits (PIC) and Electronic Integrated Circuits (EIC) to be integrated in a single substrate, hence it is regarded as one of the most promising solutions to address these challenges. However, with the increasing frequency of signals and the increasing number of integrated photonics and electronic devices, parasitic effects are becoming more prominent, leading to a significant degradation in the integration density, bandwidth density, and energy efficiency of the chip. 2.5D/3D integration technologies can effectively reduce the electrical interconnect length and chip size, thus reducing parasitic effects and power consumption, as well as increasing integration density. This paper presents different schemes of silicon based optoelectronic integration and its recent advances, and looks forward to the application prospects of 2.5D/3D integration technologies in data communication, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), biochemical sensing, and optical computing, et al.