Abstract
Silicon Photonics has the potential to revolutionise a whole raft of application areas. Currently, the main focus is on various forms of optical interconnects as this is a near term bottleneck for the computing industry, and hence this application area is high profile. However, adoption of silicon photonics for such a mass production area would also significantly benefit a range of other application areas. One of the key components that will enable silicon photonics to flourish in all of the potential application areas is a high performance optical modulator. Therefore we will propose what is in our view the need for optical modulation in silicon on insulator, the concept of optical modulation in silicon and its principles, and we discuss different devices, as well as how they evolved, in order to achieve the required target driven by high integration.