Silicon photonics and coherent communications are a near perfect match. Coherent requires complex transceivers with polarization diversity, multi-element modulators, hybrids, ease of packaging with electronics, etc.; and silicon photonics favors applications that use external lasers because of its indirect bandgap. The commercial success of this marriage has helped generate silicon photonics offspring in other areas, including short-reach non-coherent communications, optical coherent tomography, LiDAR, and deep learning.
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