Integrated microwave photonics on silicon-on-insulator platform

For the last 30 years, most microwave photonic systems demonstrated relied on discrete photonic devices and optical fibers, and thus their performances are routinely limited in terms of the cost, footprint, reliability, power consumption, and so on. To address these issues, now it is widely believed that MWP systems of the next generation will be built on photonic integrated circuits (PIC). On the other hand, motivated by applications in optical interconnect systems, silicon photonics based on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform has grown as one of the most matured photonic integration technology. Therefore, a lot of efforts recently are devoted to integrate MWP systems on SOI so as to take advantages of silicon photonics, including CMOS compatibility, low cost and large volume manufacturing, and so on.