Photoelectric chips are generally made of compound semiconductor materials (InP and GaAs, etc.), and realize the mutual conversion of photoelectric signals through the generation and absorption of photons accompanied by the internal energy level transition process.
Microelectronic chips use current signals as the carrier of information, while photonic chips use higher frequency light waves as the carrier of information. Compared with electronic integrated circuits or electrical interconnection technologies, optical chips show lower transmission losses, wider transmission bandwidth, smaller time delays, and greater resistance to electromagnetic interference.
In addition, optical interconnection can also improve the communication capacity within the transmission medium by using multiple multiplexing methods, such as wavelength division multiplexing WDM, mode division interoperability MDM, etc. Therefore, on-chip optical interconnection based on integrated optical path is considered as a promising technology, which can effectively break through the bottleneck of the physical limit of traditional integrated circuits.