Electrical interconnects are approaching their practical limits in bandwidth density, latency and energy per bit at precisely the moment when AI data centres, 5G/6G transport and large-scale sensor networks demand another order of magnitude of capacity. Silicon photonics offers a credible answer: complete optical circuits are realised on the silicon-on-insulator platform using standard CMOS foundry processes, so that photonic and electronic functions can be co-designed, co-fabricated and co-packaged at low cost and high volume.

This talk presents a device-to-system view of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for communications and networking. It starts from the two building blocks that play the role of the transistor in the optical domainmultimode interference (MMI) couplers and microring resonators and shows how general and restricted interference MMI architectures, together with engineered Fano and EIT-like resonances, yield compact, low-loss and fabrication-tolerant functional elements. On this foundation the talk reviews ultra-low-power PAM-4 transmitters for optical interconnects and data-centre networks, mode and wavelength (de)multiplexers, and all-optical logic gates; on-chip optical neural networks and coherent convolution processors that perform inference and image processing at line rate; and highly sensitive integrated optical sensors that feed environmental, marine and biomedical IoT networks. The presentation closes with co-packaged optics, photonic–electronic co-design and integrated quantum photonics as the near-term agenda, and with the opportunities these directions open for the semiconductor and photonics ecosystem of the region.