The Need for New Materials in Silicon Photonics to Enhance Data Throughput

Over the last decade, Silicon Photonics has rapidly matured. The use of standard equipment from the CMOS industry for realizing photonic integrated circuits has allowed to scale up their fabrication in a cost-effective way, to increase their complexity and to reach high yield. Several major foundries around the world now offer a silicon photonics platform. To fully exploit its functionality, the introduction of new materials might be needed however. III-V semiconductors are key for realizing efficient integrated laser sources and also for realizing higher performance modulators materials such as Lithium Niobate and Graphene are being considered. In this talk, I will give a review of the state-of-the-art in the domain and comment on possible future directions for the field.