Photonic Integration Circuits in China

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) technologies in China have made rapid progress in the past decade. In this paper, recent advances and future prospective of PICs in China are introduced and discussed, respectively. More than nine major projects in the field of PICs have been issued. Various material platforms and technologies have been developed to realize photonic integrated devices for many applications focusing on broadband communication, such as optical and wireless network, optical interconnects, and optical coherent communication. Many research achievements and breakthrough have been made under the support of these projects, such as silicon photonics transceiver, InP-based transceiver, and optical and microwave signal processing chips. It can be expected that the PICs technology will be continuously supported in the next five years, since it has been considered as one of the key enabling technologies for supporting several national major assignments and strategies, such as broadband communication, supercomputing and datacenter.