Data transport across short electrical wires is limited by both bandwidth and power density, which creates a performance bottleneck for semiconductor microchips in modern computer systems--from mobile phones to large-scale data centres. These limitations can be overcome by using optical communications based on chip-scale electronic-photonic systems enabled by silicon-based nanophotonic devices. However, combining electronics and photonics on the same chip has proved challenging, owing to microchip manufacturing conflicts between electronics and photonics. Consequently, current electronic-photonic chips are limited to niche manufacturing processes and include only a few optical devices alongside simple circuits. Here we report an electronic-photonic system on a single chip integrating over 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components that work together to provide logic, memory, and interconnect functions. This system is a realization of a microprocessor that uses on-chip photonic devices to directly communicate with other chips using light. To integrate electronics and photonics at the scale of a microprocessor chip, we adopt a 'zero-change' approach to the integration of photonics. Instead of developing a custom process to enable the fabrication of photonics, which would complicate or eliminate the possibility of integration with state-of-the-art transistors at large scale and at high yield, we design optical devices using a standard microelectronics foundry process that is used for modern microprocessors. This demonstration could represent the beginning of an era of chip-scale electronic-photonic systems with the potential to transform computing system architectures, enabling more powerful computers, from network infrastructure to data centres and supercomputers.

and data-center networks 3, 6, 7

Integrating photonics with advanced electronics leverages transistor performance, process fidelity and package integration, to enable a new class of systems-on-a-chip for a variety of applications ranging from computing and communications to sensing and imaging. Monolithic silicon photonics is a promising solution to meet the energy efficiency, sensitivity, and cost requirements of these applications. In this review paper, we take a comprehensive view of the performance of the silicon-photonic technologies developed to date for photonic interconnect applications. We also present the latest performance and results of our "zero-change" silicon photonics platforms in 45 nm and 32 nm SOI CMOS. The results indicate that the 45 nm and 32 nm processes provide a "sweet-spot" for adding photonic capability and enhancing integrated system applications beyond the Moore-scaling, while being able to offload major communication tasks from more deeply-scaled compute and memory chips without complicated 3D integration approaches.

High quality factor (Q approximately 3.4 x 10(6)) microdisk resonators are demonstrated in a Si(3)N(4) on SiO(2) platform at 652-660 nm with integrated in-plane coupling waveguides. Critical coupling to several radial modes is demonstrated using a rib-like structure with a thin Si(3)N(4) layer at the air-substrate interface to improve the coupling.

High quality (Q approximately 6 x 10(5)) microdisk resonators are demonstrated in a Si(3)N(4) on SiO(2) platform at 652-660 nm with integrated in-plane wrap-around coupling waveguides to enable critical coupling to specific microdisk radial modes. Selective coupling to the first three radial modes with >20dB suppression of the other radial modes is achieved by controlling the wrap-around waveguide width. Advantages of such pulley-coupled microdisk resonators include single mode operation, ease of fabrication due to larger waveguide-resonator gaps, the possibility of resist reflow during the lithography phase to improve microdisk etched surface quality, and the ability to realize highly over-coupled microdisks suitable for low-loss delay lines and add-drop filters.