Recent Progress in Silicon Photonics R&D and Manufacturing on 300mm Wafer Platform

Expanding the Silicon Photonics Portfolio With Silicon Nitride Photonic Integrated Circuits

“…In its basic form SOI-based silicon photonics provides passive components such as waveguides, splitters, wavelength filters, interferometers, resonators, polarization management devices and couplers to guide light in and out of the silicon chip [22], [27]- [29]. In its more advanced form, it provides advanced photonic functions such as high speed (40 Gb/s and beyond) modulators and monolithically integrated detectors [2]- [4]. Moreover, the high thermo-optic coefficient of silicon is exploited for realizing tunable filters [30], tuning of fabricationinduced errors [31] for interferometric devices and for lowspeed switching operations [32].…”

“…Moreover, the high thermo-optic coefficient of silicon is exploited for realizing tunable filters [30], tuning of fabricationinduced errors [31] for interferometric devices and for lowspeed switching operations [32]. Low-cost access to SOIbased silicon photonics is commercially available through the MPW services offered by various CMOS pilot lines [18] and foundries [2], [3].…”

“…In SOI-based silicon photonics, germanium is epitaxially grown on top of silicon for photodetection. Demonstrations of monolithically integrated germanium p-i-n [2], [3], [106] and Avalanche Photo Diodes (APD) [107] have been reported. Low dark currents of 4 nA and bandwidths of 67 GHz have been reported with a 0.74 A/W responsivity for C-band operation in monolithically integrated Germanium p-i-n photodiodes [108].…”

“…It has made its way from research labs to manufacturing foundries [2]- [4] and ultimately to the market. It may be described as a technology that uses a high index contrast material platform for wafer-scale fabrication of high density and low-cost Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) in a CMOS fab delivering high yield.…”

Waveguide-coupled detector in zero-change complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor

“…For example, even if optical detection can be achieved by midband gap absorption in doped or poly-crystalline silicon waveguides or by internal photoemission absorption in Schottky junctions, 2,3 the most typical approach consists of incorporating pure germanium on silicon. [4][5][6] As a consequence, a complete toolbox has so far been demonstrated only in modified CMOS flows 4,5 and rely on the 90 nm or older nodes, which are no longer utilized for building HPC microprocessors. 7 The modification of existing nodes, moreover, requires costly process development and challenges fabrication yield.…”