Evolution of photonic integrated circuits

Abstract

Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) are evolving rapidly for applications from interconnects to sensors. We present the evolution of four different platforms for photonic integration: pure III-V/InP, pure SOI (monolithic silicon photonics), III-V heterogeneously integrated on SOI (heterogeneous integration), and III-V epitaxially grown on silicon. Presently, thousands of optical devices are integrated into PICs to achieve multiterabit per second transceivers, LIDARs, and chemical sensors.