Silicon photonics: from present status to future developments

Silicon photonics gathered a great amount of investments during the last decade. Both research centres and major industries directed their resources towards this promising technology. As a result, different technological platforms have been proposed [17] and some of them are now accessible through multi-project wafer services. This interest was fuelled by the idea of exploiting CMOS fabs capability to implement a large scale industrialization of low cost and highly integrated electro-optic chips. The amount of digital data exchanged is in fact constantly increasing: by the end of 2020 global IP traffic will reach 2.3 ZB per year, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22% [8]. This trend is pushing the need for high data-rate optical communication systems toward shorter and shorter distances, from intra-data centers to on-board and on-chip communications [9]. Silicon photonics is seen as the most promising technology to reach the required cost per bit and level of integration and nowadays its evolution is mainly driven by the data centers market.