Silicon Photonic Modulation Circuitry

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on various integrated modulation circuitry on silicon chips. It provides an analysis of several practical schemes. It focuses on several recently developed processing schemes in silicon that are allowing future incorporation of photonic devices with existing electronic processing chips. The intense involvement of industry in this field emphasizes its commercial value and the potential impact of this direction of research. Due to historic reasons, silicon has become the major platform for microelectronic processing boards. The fabrication facilities and factories are adjusted to operate with this material and its cost justifies its wide commercial usage. However, silicon has one major drawback. Although it exhibits some optics-related effects, such as the free-carrier plasma-dispersion effect and the thermo-optic effect, there is no significant evidence of the existence of other effects that are most often used in modulation devices. Nevertheless, it has been recently demonstrated that strained silicon exhibits a small electro-optic Pockels effect.