Recent progress in silica-based planar lightwave circuits on silicon

Low-loss integrated silica waveguides on silicon allow the efficient interaction of guided-wave optical signals and are used to form a variety of planar lightwave circuits for optical branching, switching and filtering. Silica waveguides can also be used as platforms (motherboards) for hybrid optoelectronic (OE) integration. The paper reviews recent progress on silica waveguide technologies which are currently penetrating the passive component market for optical networks and providing innovative ways of packaging OE components.