Silicon photonic integrated circuits and its application in data center

The technological essence of silicon photonic integrated circuits is to utilize the mature complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, or the processes compatible with CMOS technology, to monolithically integrate various kinds of photonic devices in silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate. The technology of silicon photonic integrated circuits can fabricate large-scale integrated photonic devices for mass production, providing innovative solutions to the ever-growing demands of high bandwidth, low manufacturing cost, low power consumption in data center, high performance computing center, artificial intelligence and cloud storage. Highspeed optical transceiver modules based on silicon photonic integrated circuits have been commercialized in recent years. Moreover, co-packaged optics (CPO) has become a hot topic and trend for the assembly solution of next generation high-speed switch, and is expected to replace the hot-pluggable optical transceiver modules in the near future.