Heterogeneous photonic integration for microwave systems applications

As the component count rises in photonic systems, photonic integration becomes increasingly attractive from a cost, power consumption, and footprint perspective due to the ability to reduce the on-chip to off-chip interfaces and simplify packaging. Although photonic integration has been investigated in many forms over the last decade, the incompatibility of passive and active devices in standard integration platforms has limited their use in both military and commercial systems. In this talk, we review a heterogeneous silicon integration platform that provides state of the art active and passive devices integrated on silicon substrates for microwave systems-on-chip.