With many new technological challenges unfolding, there is plenty of room for
integrated photonics researchers in China to contribute and hopefully take a
leading role in the near to intermediate future.
alignment approach. They also realized an apodized grating
coupler, which attained one of the best coupling efficiencies
experimentally reported to date, with a loss of only 1. 2 dB
attained using a coupler fabricated by electron beam lithography
and a subwavelength grating coupler (which can be fabricated
by the same etch step as the waveguides). The group showed
how polarization-independent coupling may be achieved using
subwavelength structures.
One of us (Andrew W. Poon) at HKUST has been spearheading silicon photonics research for nearly a decade. Poon’s
group focuses on the design, fabrication and characterization
of microresonator-based devices on silicon chips. The host of
silicon photonic devices demonstrated on-chip optical interconnections and biosensing, including electro-optically reconfigurable add-drop filters, electro-optical switches and modulators,
electro-optically reconfigurable delays, coupled-resonator optical
waveguide delays, wavelength-selective sub-bandgap all-silicon
photodetectors and microparticle add-drop devices.
Poon’s group has exploited both SOI and deposited SiN on
silica substrates. The Nanoelectronics Fabrication Facility of
HKUST, a fully equipped facility for 0.35-mm complementary metal oxide semiconductor processes, fabricated all of
their devices. Recently, Poon’s group has been working toward
III-V heterogeneous integration on silicon for active devices
for on-chip optical interconnections. In collaboration with
electrical engineer Kei May Lau of HKUST, Poon’s group and
Lau’s team are investigating monolithic high-speed low-voltage
small-footprint waveguide photodetectors by hetero-epitaxy of
high-crystalline-quality III-V on silicon. In addition, Poon’s
group and Huang’s group of the Institute of Semiconductors,
CAS, have also started a joint venture to realize III-V-on-silicon
unidirectional microcavity lasers, with the goal of demonstrating unidirectional laser emission in a silicon waveguide.
Future outlook
Looking ahead, we feel that the future seems bright for
integrated photonics research in China. With many new
technological challenges unfolding, there is plenty of room for
integrated photonics researchers in China to contribute and
hopefully take a leading role in the near to intermediate future.
With the growing number of integrated photonics research
groups over many major university laboratories and research
institutions in China, and strong backing from the Chinese
government, we are optimistic that the importance and impact
ONLINE EXTRA: Visit www.osa-opn.org for a comprehensive reference list that reflects more important work being
done in China on integrated photonics.
of integrated photonics research in China will grow to a new
height. Integrated photonics “made in China” is already here,
but the best is yet to come. t
We gratefully acknowledge many research groups in China contributing
their research highlights to this article, including Buwen Cheng, Qiming
Wang, Wei Wang, Lingjuan Zhao and Ninghua Zhu of Institute of
Semiconductors, CAS; Yi Luo and Changzheng Sun of Tsinghua University; Qihuang Gong and Zhiping Zhou of Peking University; Sailing
He and Deren Yang of Zhejiang University; H.P. Chan of CityU; and
Kei May Lau of HKUST. We also thank many of our former and present
students, post-doctoral fellows and colleagues who contributed to this
article and their research work highlighted here. These include H. Chen
(now at Sun Yat-Sen University), X. Chen (now at Surrey University),
C. W. Chow (now at National Chiao Tung University), C. Li (now at
Institute of Microelectronics, A*STAR Singapore), X. Luo (now at Institute of Microelectronics, A*STAR Singapore), B. Xiong (now at Tsinghua
University), L. Xu (now at Columbia University); Y.-F. Xiao, X. Hu and
H. Yang of Peking University; S. Feng, T. Lei and H. Cai of HKUST.
Andrew W. Poon ( eeawpoon@ust.hk) is with the department of electronic
and computer engineering, HKUST, Hong Kong. Linjie Zhou, and Jianping
Chen are with the State Key Laboratory on Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, SJTU, Shanghai. Yong-Zhen Huang and
Jinzhong Yu are with the State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, Institute of Semiconductors, CAS, Beijing. Jian-Jun He is with the Centre for Integrated Optoelectronics, State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical
Instrumentation, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou. Hon K. Tsang is
with the department of electronic engineering, CUHK, Hong Kong. Member
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