The Fundamental Structure of Silicon Photonic Chips and Applications in Optical Communication

With the rapid advancement of modern technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), the demand for data processing and transmission in human society has experienced exponential growth, driving an unprecedented surge in broadband network capacity requirements. As its core support, optical communication is facing major challenges. Silicon-based photonic chips, characterized by small size, light weight, and low power consumption, are key devices to break through the bottlenecks of optical communication systems. This paper enumerates the composite structures of silicon-based photonic chips and discusses different types of structures. It compares different types of Mach-Zehnder interferometers, micro-ring resonators, Positive-Intrinsic-Negative photodiodes, Avalanche photodiodes, silicon-based quantum dot lasers, and explores their performance as well as their applications in optical communication. In addition, it provides an outlook on the future of silicon-based photonic chips and optical communication.