Chapter 1Introduction1.1 Why silicon integrated photonics?Gordon Moore's 1965 observation (now universally called Moore's Law) that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years is become a beacon that continues to lead the electronics industry [1]. Integrated circuits have grown exponentially from the 30-transistor devices of 1965 to today's high-end microprocessors, surpassing 500 million transistors integrated onto a silicon chip the size of your fingernail. Moore's Law will be maintained, with more than a billion transistors per chip expected by 2010. Decades of investment in research and manufacturing to apply Moore's Law have resulted in significant cost reductions. For example, in 1968, the cost of a transistor was approximately one dollar. In 1995, one dollar could buy about 3,000 transistors. Today, one dollar can buy around five million transistors [2]. The explosion of the Internet has changed the way we live our daily lives. The thirst for information and the need to “always be connected” is driving a new era of communication. This new era will continue to drive the need for higher bandwidth technologies to keep pace with processor performance. Because of Moore's Law, computing today is limited less by the performance of the computer than by the speed at which data can travel between the processor and the outside world. Fiber optic solutions are replacing copper-based solutions, which can no longer meet the bandwidth and distance requirements needed for global data communications [3]. Over the past decade, optical communications technologies have gradually migrated from long-haul backbones to the network edge, invading metropolitan area networks (MANs) and at the campus level...... middle of paper .... .. with Photonics: An Introduction, New Jersey, John Wiley, 20043 H. Wong, “Silicon-integrated photonics begins to revolutionize”, Microelectron. Reliab., vol. 42, p. 317, 2002.4 GL. Bona, W. Denzel, B. Offrein, R. Germann, H. Salemink, and F. Horst, “High refractive index SiON waveguide and planar light wave circuits,” Opt. Eng., vol. 37, p. 3218, 1998.5 M. Paniccia and S. Koehl, “The Silicon Solution”, in IEEE Spectrum, p.1915, 2005.6 H. Wong, “Silicon integrated photonics: potentials and promises”, in EDMO Proceedings, p. 145, 2003.7 M. Salib, L. Liao, R. Jones, M. Morse, A. Liu, D. Samara-Rubio, D. Alduino, and M. Paniccia, “Silicon Photonics,” Intel Technol. J., vol. 8, p. 143, 2004.8 M. Paniccia, V. Krutul, and S. Koehl, “A Hybrid Silicon Laser: Silicon Photonics Technology for the Future.” Tera-Scale Computing,” Tech. Intel.Magazine, p..1, 2004.