Photonic Integrated Circuits - an Overview

Ponente(s): Gerardo Antonio Castañón Avila

Integrated circuits (ICs), or microchips, are essential technology of countless modern devices from smart phones, smart watches, medical devices to spacecraft. They consist of a set of electronic components such as transistors, resistors, capacitors, and amplifiers on a semiconductor wafer. Much of the functionality of these electrical components can be replaced with photonic components including waveguides, filters, splitters, combiners, interferometers, laser diodes, and gain media to create photonic integrated circuits (PICs), which use light instead of electrical current to function. PICs offer numerous advantages over IC including higher speed, greater bandwidth, and lower energy consumption. Hybrid technologies utilizing PICs and ICs as well as purely photonic circuits are advancing technology that will overpass the electronics age and into the future, pushing the boundaries of what is possible for computing, telecommunications, sensors, and consumer technology. This talk will present the physical concepts of how this technology works, the state of the art of PICs fabrication and its recent applications.