In recent decades, much research effort has been invested in the development of photonic integrated circuits, and silicon-on-insulator technology has been established as a reliable platform for highly scalable silicon-based electro-optical modulators. However, the performance of such devices is restricted by the inherent material properties of silicon. An approach to overcoming these deficiencies is to integrate organic materials with exceptionally high optical nonlinearities into a silicon-on-insulator photonic platform. Silicon–organic hybrid photonics has been shown to overcome the drawbacks of silicon-based modulators in terms of operating speed, bandwidth, and energy consumption. This work reviews recent advances in silicon–organic hybrid photonics and covers the latest improvements to single components and device concepts. Special emphasis is given to the in-device performance of novel electro-optical polymers and the use of different electro-optical effects, such as the linear and quadratic electro-optical effect, as well as the electric-field-induced linear electro-optical effect. Finally, the inherent challenges of implementing non-linear optical polymers on a silicon photonic platform are discussed and a perspective for future directions is given.

近几十年来，大量研究工作投入到光子集成电路的开发中，绝缘​​体上硅技术已成为高度可扩展的硅基光电调制器的可靠平台。然而，此类器件的性能受到硅固有材料特性的限制。克服这些缺陷的一种方法是将具有极高光学非线性的有机材料集成到绝缘体上硅光子平台中。硅-有机混合光子学已被证明可以克服硅基调制器在工作速度、带宽和能耗方面的缺点。这项工作回顾了硅有机混合光子学的最新进展，并涵盖了对单个组件和设备概念的最新改进。特别强调新型电光聚合物的器件内性能和不同电光效应的使用，例如线性和二次电光效应，以及电场诱导的线性电光效应影响。最后，讨论了在硅光子平台上实现非线性光学聚合物的固有挑战，并给出了未来方向的展望。