Silicon-organic hybrid photonics: Overview of recent advances, electro-optical effects and CMOS-integration concepts

In the last decades, much research effort has been invested to develop photonic integrated circuits and the silicon-on-insulator technology was established as reliable platform for highly scalable silicon-based electro-optical modulators. However, the device performance of such devices is restricted by the inherent material properties of silicon. A perspective approach to overcome these deficiencies is the integration of organic materials with exceptional high optical nonlinearities into a silicon-on-insulator photonic platform. Silicon-organic hybrid photonics has been shown to overcome drawbacks of silicon-based modulators in terms of operation speed, bandwidth and energy consumption. This work reviews recent advances in silicon-organic hybrid photonics and covers latest improvements of single components and device concepts. Special emphasis is given to the in-device performance of novel electro-optical polymers and the use of different electro-optical effects such as the linear and quadratic electro-optical effect as well as the electric field-induced linear electro-optical effect. Finally, the inherent challenges of implementing nonlinear optical polymers into a silicon photonic platform are discussed and a perspective for future directions is given.