Development trends in silicon photonics for data centers

An explosive increase in volume of global network and data center traffic requires an interconnection scheme with low cost, high energy efficiency, and high bandwidth capacity. The optical interconnects, especially utilizing silicon photonic platform, have been widely proposed to meet this challenging requirement as they intrinsically feature strong promise to obtain a high bandwidth and power efficient short-reach interconnection in much lower cost. In this review, we will discuss the current development trends in silicon photonics for datacenter application with emphasis on reducing cost, lowering energy consumption, and increasing capacity.