Electronic-photonic integrated circuits in silicon-on-insulator platforms

Electronic-photonic integrated circuits (EPICs) are a promising technology for overcoming bandwidth and power-consumption bottlenecks of traditional integrated circuits. Silicon is a good candidate for building such devices, due to its high-index contrast and low propagation loss at telecom wavelengths. This work presents recent advances in demonstrating discrete components built in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platforms, around 1550 nm, that can be used as building blocks for future EPIC systems. The work covers several microring-based structures suitable for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) applications, such as hitless single-ring filters, multi-channel second-order tunable filterbanks, reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs) with telecom-grade specifications, and dynamical slow light cells for delay lines and optical memory elements. © 2011 IEEE.