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Silicon is a material where the extraordinary is made ordinary.1 This statement
has been prompted by the rapid (exponential) development of the industry
based on manufacturing silicon devices, which has seen enormous performance
improvements and cost reductions over the last fifty years. Coming
after the stone, iron, and industrial ages, the electronic age commenced with
the invention of the transistor in 1947 by J. Bardeen and W.H. Brattain
and then became a reality when the first electronic integrated circuit was
developed by J. S. Kilby in 1957. The first microprocessor chip (model 4004
with 2300 transistors) was realized by Intel in 1971. During those early days,
Gordon Moore coined his famous empirical law: the number of transistors
on an integrated circuit would double every 12 months (lately corrected to
18 months).2 Today we are at the 130nm feature-size node with hundreds of
millions of transistors on a single silicon chip, and the semiconductor industry
is on track to have the 65 nm node in production during 2005 by using
300mm diameter silicon wafers.
This book gives a fascinating picture of the state of the art in silicon photonics and a perspective on what can be expected in the near future. It is composed of a selected number of reviews authored by world leaders in the field and is written from both academic and industrial viewpoints. An in-depth discussion of the route towards fully integrated silicon photonics is presented. This book will be useful not only to physicists, chemists, materials scientists, and engineers but also to graduate students who are interested in the fields of microphotonics and optoelectronics. |
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