Thirty Years in Silicon Photonics: A Personal View

Silicon Photonics, the technology where optical devices are fabricated by mainstream microelectronic processing technology, was proposed almost 30 years ago. I joined this research field at its start. Initially, concentrated on main issue of lack a silicon laser. Room temperature visible emission from porous first, and nanocrystals then, showed that gain is possible in low-dimensional silicon, but it severely counterbalanced nonlinear losses due to free carriers. Then, most my focus systems photons show novel features such as Zener tunneling or Anderson localization. Here, game engineer suitable dielectric environments (e.g., one-dimensional photonic crystals waveguide-based microring resonators) control photon propagation. Applications raised up sensing gas-sensing bio-sensing) photovoltaics. Interestingly, resonators emerged fundamental device for integrated circuit since they allow studying hermitian non-hermitian physics light propagation well demonstrating on-chip heavily networks reconfigurable switching applications neural signal processing. Finally, witnessed emergence quantum devices, linear effects generate states light. random number generators heralded single-photon sources enabled photonics. All these developments discussed review following own path.