Scaling photonic integrated circuits with InP technology: A perspective

The number of photonic components integrated into the same circuit is approaching one million, but so far, this has been without the large-scale integration of active components: lasers, amplifiers, and high-speed modulators. Emerging applications in communication, sensing, and computing sectors will benefit from the functionality gained with high-density active–passive integration. Indium phosphide offers the richest possible combinations of active components, but in the past decade, their pace of integration scaling has not kept up with passive components realized in silicon. In this work, we offer a perspective for functional scaling of photonic integrated circuits with actives and passives on InP platforms, in the axes of component miniaturization, areal optimization, and wafer size scaling.