Silicon Photonics

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What Does Silicon Photonics Mean?

Silicon photonics is the innovative study and application of photonic systems for generating, processing, manipulating and otherwise using light for faster data transmission both between and within microchips. Silicon is used as the optical medium. Operation is in infrared wavelengths (commonly 1.55 micrometers), which are used in fiber-optic telecommunication systems.

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Silicon photonics, with its ultra-fast data transfer between and within microchips, will significantly determine future progress in computer technology and the continuation of Moore’s law.

Techopedia Explains Silicon Photonics

Silicon photonics is being aggressively researched by both IBM and Intel for semiconductor fabrication techniques. These techniques integrate both optical and electronic components on microchips as they attempt to validate Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit should double every two years.

The presence of nonlinearity and nonlinear optical phenomena (such as the Kerr effect, Raman effect, free charge carrier interactions and two-photon absorption) enables light to interact with light, which allows many things of great academic interest, including wavelength conversion, all-optical signal routing and silicon waveguides.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.