硅基光子技术发展的特点、机遇与挑战

[摘要] 通信容量的爆炸式增长促进了光子技术的发展，认为以硅材料为基底的硅基光子器件与集成技术具有低功耗、高速率、结构紧凑等突出优势，将成为解决信息网络所面临的功耗、速率、体积等方面瓶颈的关键技术。通过与微电子行业的发展进行对比，分析了硅基光子发展的特点及关键技术挑战，并给出了对其未来发展机遇的思考。

[关键词] 硅基光子；光子集成；光电混合集成；光通信

[Abstract] The explosive growth in telecommunication capacity promotes the development of silicon photonics. To break the bottlenecks (power consumption, bandwidth and volume) of current information networks, several outstanding advantages of silicon photonics including low power consumption, high speed and very compact size are introduced in this paper. Comparing with the development of the microelectronics industry, the features and the major challenges of silicon photonics are analyzed, and the opportunities in the future are also pointed out.

[Keywords] silicon photonics; integrated optics; optical communication; opto-electronic hybrid integration