Silicon has remained the microelectronics industry’s semiconductor of choice for more than a half century. That history makes it a uniquely attractive material for use in photonics: If Si-based devices could manipulate photons within a circuit, the miniaturization of electronics would not suffer as much from problems such as thermal dissipation and increasingly fragile wiring. Engineers could exploit decades-old silicon manufacturing expertise to construct photonic components alongside electronic ones, all on the same chip, to control much speedier trafficking of data among different devices.
In pursuit of that vision, researchers throughout the 1990s developed a suite of silicon components, such as waveguides, multiplexers, optical filters, and photodetectors. A year ago, Mario Paniccia and colleagues from Intel Corp constructed an oxide-gated silicon device that modulates the intensity of an incoming optical beam by converting high-speed electrical signals into optical ones (see Physics Today, April 2004, page 24). Developing...
