Silicon Photonic Filters: A Pathway from Basics to Applications

Abstract

Silicon photonics has found a profound place among emerging technologies in the past few decades due to several advantages. Due to a series of breakthroughs and increased funding from private and government sectors, the development of silicon photonics has accelerated especially starting from the two years 2004–2005 with a persisting and ever‐growing momentum. Among various components, the silicon photonic filters that selectively pass or block particular wavelengths with a finite bandwidth have found particular interest as they are useful in signal processing in different fields ranging from optical communication to microwave photonics and quantum photonics. Herein, a comprehensive review of silicon photonic filters focusing on the four most commonly used architectures, such as microring resonators, waveguide Bragg grating, Mach–Zehnder interferometers, and arrayed waveguide grating, encapsulating basics, and guidelines, in terms of simulating tools and topologies, of realizing reconfigurable and high‐performing filters for several applications, is provided. The novelty of this review relies on the fact that it summarizes these filter architectures covering a broad range of applications concisely and constructively and includes the basics, growth, and future trends, providing a clear understanding and importance of silicon photonic filters from research to commercialization perspective.

Integrated Photonic Passive Building Blocks on Silicon-on-Insulator Platform

“…A very recent review produced in 2024 by Saha et al [168] provides a comprehensive overview of four key filter architectures-microring resonators, waveguide Bragg gratings, Mach-Zehnder interferometers, and arrayed waveguide gratings-offering insights into their basics, simulation tools, and applications. By summarizing these architectures concisely, the review sheds light on the importance and future trends of silicon photonic filters from both research and commercialization perspectives.…”

Design of Channel Drop Filters Based on Photonic Crystal with a Dielectric Column with Large Radius inside Ring Resonator

“…Optical filters are widely used in optical communications, optical sensors, laser systems, spectral imaging systems [15] and other fields due to their ability to filter certain wavelengths. Currently, there are numerous techniques available for fabricating optical filters, including ring resonators [16], waveguide Bragg gratings [17,18], array waveguide gratings [19,20], Mach-Zehnder Interferometers [21] and PhCs.…”