THE CIAN CHIP
Silicon photonics is a major technology development in integrated optics, in which
the goal is to take the substantial manufacturing knowledge that exists for process-
ing silicon for electronics and apply it to making integrated optical devices. Togeth-
er, with CIAN, many major corporations, start-up companies, and universities are
dedicated to realizing this vision and products are rapidly moving into the market
place.
CIAN has focused its silicon photonics efforts on
1) identifying subsystems, such as optical add-drop nodes, that can be realized on a
silicon photonic chip;
2) Realizing unique functionalities on a silicon chip, such as low insertion loss, high
port count optical switches and spatial mode switching;
3) Bringing new materials to the silicon photonic platform to provide improvements
such as reduced thermal sensitivity as well as direct incorporation of III-V lasers
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CIAN / Center for Integrated Access Networks