What is Silicon Photonics? Pros and Cons of
Si for Photonics
Integrated photonics is a main candidate as photonic technology to provide the
various demands of numerous fi elds such as communication, computing, imaging,
and sensing. Here, the small optical and electronic elements are combined together through a common substrate by means of metal lines and optical waveguides (WGs). In short, Silicon photonics is the study and application of photonic systems which use silicon as an optical medium. with standard CMOS manufacturing equipment and processes, the Silicon photonics can produce and test the optical devices and circuits. silicon on insulator based silicon photonics have created lot of attention.The Kerr effect, the Raman effect, two photon absorption affetcs the light propagation thrugh the silicon devices besides the interactions between photons and free charge carriers.

Applications
1)Optical interconnects
electronic and optical components can be integrated on the same chip using the high speed optical interconnects.

2)Optical routers and signal processors
Uisng this , all-optical signal processing can be done directly in optical form as against doing it in the electronic form.

3)Long Range Telecommunications using Silicon Photonics
scaling of the internet bandwidth capacity can be done using micro-scale, ultra low power devices. The datacenters may consume significantly less power in this way.

Physical properties
The physical properties that the silicon photonic devices have are:
-Optical guiding and dispersion tailoring
-Kerr nonlinearity
-Two-photon absorption
-Free charge carrier interactions
-The Raman effect

For further details, refer these links:
http://en.wikipediawiki/Silicon_photonics
http://download-itfree_files/Pages%20from%20Chapter%2027%20-%20Silicon%20Photonics-c58bf084940b79f8832eef1a3874d12b.pdf
http://techresearch.intelarticles/Tera-Scale/1419.htm
http://domino.research.ibmcomm/research_...index.html