Silicon Photonic Platform for Passive Waveguide Devices: Materials, Fabrication, and Applications

Silicon photonics has attracted tremendous interest from academia and industry, as the fabrication of the silicon family of photonic devices is mostly compatible with the microelectronics process using complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS). Herein, three silicon-family materials are discussed: silicon, silicon nitride, and silica. In addition, hybrid integration with a 2D material, graphene, is examined. First, the material and waveguide properties are reviewed. Second, typical fabrication processes for waveguide devices are introduced. Subsequently, a variety of passive waveguide devices, operating at different physical dimensions covering wavelength, polarization, and mode, are discussed. They correspond to fixed and tunable filters, polarization beam splitters and rotators, and mode conversion and multiplexing devices. These passive waveguide devices play important roles in a wide range of applications including telecom, interconnects, computing, sensing, quantum information processing, bio-photonics, and energy.