Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are considered as the way to make photonic systems or subsystems cheap and ubiquitous. PICs still are several orders of magnitude more expensive than their microelectronic counterparts, which has restricted their application to a few niche markets.

This paper gives an overview of the 3-µm silicon-oninsulator (SOI) platform that is openly available from VTT and suitable for the realization of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for near and mid-infrared applications. Specific benefits of this thick-SOI PIC platform include low optical losses (∼0.1 dB/cm), ultradense integration (µm-scale bends), small polarization dependency (down-to-zero birefringence), and ability to tolerate relatively high optical powers (>1 W). Fabrication technology is based on an i-line stepper and 150-mm wafer size. Open access to the waveguide platform is supported by design kits, wafer-level testing, multi-project wafer runs, dedicated R&D runs, and small-to-medium volume manufacturing.

Innovative photonic solutions designed and developed in the H2020 research project PASSION are presented for the future metropolitan area network (MAN) supporting different aggregated data traffic volumes and operating at heterogenous granularities. System performance evaluated both by simulations and experimentation regarding the proposed vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) -based modular sliceable bandwidth/bitrate variable transceiver (S-BVT) are shown in realistic MANs organized by hierarchical levels with the crossing of multiple nodes characterized by new switching/aggregation technologies. The capabilities and challenges of the proposed cost-effective, energy-efficient and reduced footprint technological solutions will be demonstrated to face the request of huge throughput and traffic scalability.

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