CORNERSTONE’s Silicon Photonics Rapid Prototyping Platforms: Current Status and Future Outlook

Abstract

The field of silicon photonics has experienced widespread adoption in the datacoms industry over the past decade, with a plethora of other applications emerging more recently such as light detection and ranging (LIDAR), sensing, quantum photonics, programmable photonics and artificial intelligence. As a result of this, many commercial complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) foundries have developed open access silicon photonics process lines, enabling the mass production of silicon photonics systems. On the other side of the spectrum, several research labs, typically within universities, have opened up their facilities for small scale prototyping, commonly exploiting e-beam lithography for wafer patterning. Within this ecosystem, there remains a challenge for early stage researchers to progress their novel and innovate designs from the research lab to the commercial foundries because of the lack of compatibility of the processing technologies (e-beam lithography is not an industry tool). The CORNERSTONE rapid-prototyping capability bridges this gap between research and industry by providing a rapid prototyping fabrication line based on deep-UV lithography to enable seamless scaling up of production volumes, whilst also retaining the ability for device level innovation, crucial for researchers, by offering flexibility in its process flows. This review article presents a summary of the current CORNERSTONE capabilities and an outlook for the future.

CW Emission and Self-Pulsing in a III-V/SiN Hybrid Laser With Narrow Band Mirror

“…I N recent years silicon photonics platforms have been attracting surging interest from industries [1] for their application in the context of transmitters in optical communications, as well as in the context of sensing and LIDAR. Here, the integration of laser sources represents one of the main challenges towards commercialization, despite the several recent technological advancements.…”

A Si Optical Modulator Based on Fano-Like Resonance

“…A prototype device is fabricated through our CORNERSTONE multi-project wafer (MPW) service [19,20] and the design of it is as follows. The cross section view of the waveguide with the PN junction is given in Fig.…”

Wafer-Scale Demonstration of Low-Loss (∼0.43 dB/cm), High-Bandwidth (>38 GHz), Silicon Photonics Platform Operating at the C-Band

“…Due to the high upfront investment for CMOS manufacturing infrastructure, most silicon photonic design groups have relied on open-access foundries for the fabrication of their chips. This has initiated a series of open-access foundries such as AIM Photonics [18], AMF [19], CORNERSTONE [20], CEA-LETI [21], CompoundTek, VTT [22] and LIGENTEC [23]. A more comprehensive list of open-access foundries can be found in [17], [24].…”