Firstly, the principles of three kinds of switch technologies including Mach-Zehnder interferometer (thermo-optic and carrier-injection types), micro-ring resonator (thermo-optic and carrier-injection types) and micro-electro-mechanical-system actuated waveguide coupler. Firstly, the principles of three kinds of switch technologies including Mach-Zehnder interferometer (thermo-optic and carrier-injection types), micro-ring resonator (thermo-optic and carrier-injection types) and micro-electro-mechanical-system actuated waveguide coupler. With the advent of 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, Internet plus, and so on, data traffic is exploding and higher requirements are put forward for information transmission and switching. Traditional switching requires optical/electrical/optical. In the last decade, silicon photonic switches are increasingly believed to be potential candidates for replacing the electrical switches in the applications of telecommunication networks, data center and high-throughput computing, due to their low power consumption (Picojoules per bit), large. Fueled by growing demand for cloud computing applications, such as machine learning, the scale, bandwidth, and power consumption of data center networks continue to increase, and with it, a demand for novel network technologies and architectures. In this paper, the research progress of various silicon photonic switch.
