Photonic integrated circuits for access and transport networks

In this talk, we will review recent advances in the semiconductor photonic components, photonic integrated circuits and the integration methodologies implemented on the traditional compound semiconductor as well as the emerging CMOS-compatible silicon platform. The proliferations of smart phones and multimedia network of things have escalated the traffic of speedily delivery of multimedia contents from the remote data centers to the end users through the vast broadband optic fiber access network and high capacity optic transport infrastructures. To deliver these content-rich data from the remote data centers to the end users, the capacity and speed of the optic fiber infrastructure and access nodes have seen 100x increases over the past decade, which is expected to continue growing by another 10- to 100-fold in the next decade, as illustrated in Figure 1. Traditional optoelectronics transceivers in the optical terminals are made with discrete optical components. With the increasing popularity and deployment of compact pluggable modules to achieve higher operating speed and packing density on the precious real estate in optical terminals, many photonic integration technologies are utilized to achieve the economic scale to match the fast expansion of the optic fiber networks, as shown in Figure 2. Table 1 lists several examples of high speed optoelectronic devices which constitute the building blocks of the photonic integration technologies. It is clear that these components are able to generate and detect optical signals at a channel data rate of 100 Gb/s and beyond with advanced modulation formats. Many performance trade-offs by the integration can be mitigated by the accompanied CMOS electronic processors to offer enhanced stability with new functionalities. In this talk, we will review recent advances in the high speed semiconductor optoelectronic devices and photonic integrated circuits implemented on traditional III-V compound semiconductors, the CMOS-compatible silicon photonics and the emerging hybrid III-V/SOI integration platforms.