A brief history into photonics might suggest that the sub-discipline of nanophotonics still quiet an untapped market with much potential to be harnessed. A countable number of data points fill the the timeline from 1909 to the present. Inspiring the question that motivated this paper, why are there so few milestone moments in photonics over such a long period of time? Ultimately this question resulted in our review of nanophotonics integration with CMOS integrated circuits in response to Moore’s Law. Therefore, in this review we present our review of the modules in CMOS IC that are causing the slow down in Moore’s law, the nanophotonic analogs that may be viable replacements, and the breakthroughs in nanophotonics that have enabled these technological advancements

A newer type of Si-based laser, the bulk silicon laser, was developed recently in 2011 by the Institute of Optics and Atomic Physics in Berlin, Germany. [5] In this design, a single-crystal bulk silicon medium is used to produce the Raman laser instead of a waveguide, see Figure 8. The bulk Si laser has significant advatages over the waveguide laser, including higher peak power and pulse energy, a much larger laser beam area (1 mm2 or more for bulk Si vs. 1 µm2 for waveguide), the absence of a waveguide boundary surface (allows for different types measurements), and an increased potential for new applications. The team in Germany uses the technique of cooling the silicon sample down to ≈10 K in order to overcome the FCA losses instead of applying a voltage. Only pulsed operation has been achieved so far in a bulk silicon laser and, interestingly, the Raman laser pulse duration is about 4 times shorter than the input pulse duration (see Figure 9). The reason for this reduced pulse duration is that the lasing threshold is not reached until the pulse nears peak power, and once the pulse power begins to decrease the lasing power decreases more rapidly. One downside of the bulk laser is the “formation of the defocusing lens caused by refractive index changes from FC concentration gradients, induced by the transmitted laser pulse.” [5] Fortunately, this effect can be compensated for.