In recent times, silicon photonics have received much attention mainly for applications in data centres and communications. This work reports our recent results in a number of pertinent components necessary to realise successful implementation on silicon-on-insulator platform. We report design, modeling, and fabrication of inverse taper couplers, broadband directional couplers and polarization beam splitters. We achieved fiber-to-chip coupling loss of <2dB, ~50% splitting over bandwidth of 100 nm and polarisation extinction ratios ~40dB (both TE and TM) were obtained respectively. Furthermore, we report design and simulation of ring resonator modulators and silicon-germanium detectors with an extinction ratio of ~20dB and dark currents of ~100 nA and responsivity of 0.9A/W were obtained. Additionally, we also report polarization-independent configurations for slot waveguides that are suitable for sensing applications.