Abstract

Silicon-based photonics has generated an increased amount of interest in recent years, mainly for optical telecommunications or for optical interconnects in high- performance microelectronic circuits. The development of elementary passive and active components (input/output couplers, hybrid sources, modulators, passive functions, and photodetectors) has reached such a performance level that the combination of these building blocks can lead to the development and commercialization of high-performance transceivers such as a new generation of active optic cables [1]. Photonics chips with active devices are connected to electronic drivers or amplifiers and thus the integration challenge of silicon photonics with microelectronic circuits has been studied for a long time [2]. The rationale of silicon photonics is the reduction of the cost of photonic systems through the integration of photonic components and an electronic integrated circuit (EIC) on a common chip. In the longer term, the introduction of an optical network between cores of a high-performance circuit will require this cointegration for the enhancement of the data rate with lower power consumption. Therefore, many integration schemes have been studied and developed. Each one has its figures of merits and can fulfill a special application with a particular packaging. For example, biosensing and high-performance computing systems will not necessarily share the same integration schemes because the specifications and the system packaging differ strongly.