The emerging applications of silicon photonics

Silicon photonics (SiP) is a disruptive photonic platform offering unprecedented possibilities via advantages in photonic integration density and scalability. The technology has witnessed significant commercial success, particularly in data-center applications with co-packaged optics (CPO) and high-speed transceivers, with leading manufacturers reporting 1.6-Tbp/s interconnect performance. This perspective highlights how SiP is set to disrupt emerging verticals: light detection and ranging (LiDAR), quantum processing, and neuromorphic computing. SiP will be indispensable for autonomous systems, where silicon optical phased arrays (OPAs) deliver solid-state beam steering and coherent detection for simultaneous range and velocity determination. SiP will also enable manufacturable and scalable quantum computing through frequency-domain parallelization, modular fiber-link architectures, and complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible platforms. SiP is also anticipated to power ultra-low-latency edge applications through wavelength-diverse all-optical processing and hybrid photonic-electronic architectures. In light of recent developments, we present our perspective on the potential of SiP to drive the next generation of sensing, computing, and artificial intelligence systems.