Progress in silicon platforms for integrated optics

Abstract

Rapid progress has been made in recent years repurposing CMOS fabrication tools to build complex photonic circuits. As the field of silicon photonics becomes more mature, foundry processes will be an essential piece of the ecosystem for eliminating process risk and allowing the community to focus on adding value through clever design. Multi-project wafer runs are a useful tool to promote further development by providing inexpensive, low-risk prototyping opportunities to academic and commercial researchers. Compared to dedicated silicon manufacturing runs, multi-project-wafer runs offer cost reductions of 100 × or more. Through OpSIS, we have begun to offer validated device libraries that allow designers to focus on building systems rather than modifying device geometries. The EDA tools that will enable rapid design of such complex systems are under intense development. Progress is also being made in developing practical optical and electronic packaging solutions for the photonic chips, in ways that eliminate or sharply reduce development costs for the user community. This paper will provide a review of the recent developments in silicon photonic foundry offerings with a focus on OpSIS, a multiproject-wafer foundry service offering a silicon photonics platform, including a variety of passive components as well as high-speed modulators and photodetectors, through the Institute of Microelectronics in Singapore.

Open-Access Silicon Photonics: Current Status and Emerging Initiatives

“…One of the key mechanisms behind the economic success of silicon electronics is the open-access model, where fabless companies can have chips fabricated in commercial foundries that provide standardized fabrication platforms. This separation of design and product development on one hand, and fabrication on the other hand, has acted as a multiplier in economic activity, with hundreds of thriving fabless companies for every foundry [34], [142], [143]. It is a win-win formula, lowering the investment for fabless companies and generating profitable volumes for the foundries.…”

“…For the proof-of-concept and early stage R&D, MPW shuttle runs are ideally suited. MPWs play an instrumental role in catalyzing the field of silicon photonics by providing lowcost access to start-ups, small/medium enterprises (SME), and low-CAP companies to test their design ideas using a standard process flow of different fabs offering open-access technologies [33], [34], [143]. MPW helps the designers to gauge the capabilities available in a technology.…”

Transfer-printing-based integration of a III-V-on-silicon distributed feedback laser

“…Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) is amongst the mainstream photonic integration platforms regarded as the most promising candidate for ultra-compact photonic integrated circuits, due to the high refractive index contrast between the silicon waveguide core and the SiO2 cladding. More importantly, the compatibility with the well-established CMOS fabrication technology, both in terms of the used materials and processing techniques, enables a low-cost and high-volume production of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with high yield [1][2][3][4]. Driven by the telecom and datacom industry significant progress has been made in the field of silicon photonics in the past decade.…”

“…Driven by the telecom and datacom industry significant progress has been made in the field of silicon photonics in the past decade. A variety of high-performance passive building blocks and high-bandwidth Si and GeSi active devices (modulators and photodetectors) have been developed making use of a strong light-matter interaction, resulting from the high confinement of the optical field in the waveguide, thereby paving the way for scalable manufacturing of complex high-speed PICs [5]. Moreover, with a wide transparency window ranging from 1.2 to 4 m, silicon photonics is emerging as a potential platform to realize miniaturized sensors [6][7][8][9].…”

All-optical switching in silicon photonic waveguides with an epsilon-near-zero resonant cavity [Invited]

“…Silicon photonics has proven to be an excellent platform for photonic integration as silicon has a high refractive index (n ∼ 3.4) and low optical losses at telecom wavelengths, while its nanofabrication is compatible with CMOS industry standards, allowing for direct compatibility with electronics [7][8][9][10]. Several electrooptical modulators have been demonstrated on a Si platform using resonant structures such as Mach-Zehnder interferometers [9,10], waveguide-ring-resonator geometries [7], and a hybrid Si-plasmonic platform [11,12] based on the application of an electric field via electrical interconnections, thus limiting the maximum modulation speed to a few tens of gigahertz.…”