Abstract

The contemporary world is, to a significant extent, defined by and heavily dependent on advanced integrated electronic technologies, omnipresent in everyday life of the information society. Electronic chips of various complexity assist practically every aspect of human activity – communicating, traveling, learning, working, shopping, entertaining, exercising, and many others. At the beginning of the XXI century, their first counterparts appeared – photonic integrated circuits (PICs), analogous to integrated electronic chips but operating in the domain of photons instead of electrons. Initial development has been strongly driven by telecom applications (the first Infinera photonic chips, presented to the market in 2003, were miniaturized WDM transmitters/receivers), then complemented by datacom-oriented solutions, currently dominating the market of PIC-based products. Recently, the increasing attractiveness of sensing applications can be observed, addressing an impressively wide application area, covering environmental and digital health monitoring, agriculture, automotive, security and safety, as dynamically developing Internet of Things (IoT). To address these challenges, integrated photonics has to leave the niche of telecom wavelengths, which the main technological platforms developed so far are optimized for. Specifically attractive is moving toward mid-IR spectral range (far above 2 µm), where the majority of chemical substances have their specific fingerprints.

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