Glass-silicon substrate for hybrid optoelectronic packaging

Optical communication systems are currently facing the move from being a simple provider of point-to-point links to providing direct access for the local loop. However, existing approaches to optoelectronics manufacturing cannot satisfy the complexity and large number of units required in applications such as fibre-to-the-home. New optoelectronic component integration and packaging techniques will therefore have to be devised to deal with the dissimilar physical, electrical, thermal and optical needs of components such as laser diodes, photodetectors, integrated circuits and optical fibres. Silicon is widely used in multichip modules (MCMs), including glass microwave integrated circuits (GMICs). GMIC was originally developed as a relatively inexpensive means of interconnecting commodity monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) on a composite glass-silicon substrate. This paper describes the development of hybrid microwave-optoelectronic integrated circuits on GMIC, a technology known as opto-GMIC