Technology development towards a generic InP-based photonic-integration foundry

Abstract

The main goal of this work is to create a generic foundry service that allows outside users (i.e., universities and small- and-medium enterprises) that do not have fabrication facilities to obtain their own custom-made InP-based photonic-integrated chips (or ASPIC, application-specific photonic-integrated circuits, similar to ASIC in electronics). In this approach, the foundry supplies the user with the cross-section of the interconnect waveguide structure, and the mask layout dimensions and performance of several pre-defined- and wellcharacterized building blocks (BB) such as photodiodes, phase modulators, and spot-size converters (for lowloss fiber-chip coupling). Using this information, the user can generate a mask layout for the foundry by placing the building blocks onto his layout canvas and interconnecting them with the interconnect waveguides. Furthermore, since the material cross-section of the interconnect waveguide is known, the user can design, simulate, and include a mask layout for a desired passive devices such as MMIs, and AWGs, which can subsequently be fabricated at the foundry. We describe the technology development towards obtaining a versatile generic-foundry platform which gives users the freedom to design a large variety of photonic-integrated- devices and circuits. Our generic-foundry technology is based on the fabrication process of our commercially-available high-speed- photodiodes and balanced photodiodes (high-frequency response up to and beyond 100 GHz). We have expanded this fabrication process to include a total of three different types of interconnecting waveguides: a low-contrast-, a medium-contrast, and a high-contrast waveguide, as well as transition BBs to couple light from one waveguide type into the other

Compact spatial multiplexers for mode division multiplexing

“…InP-based platform under PARADIGM project [28] is chosen due to its high availability of both active and passive building blocks [29,30]. To deduce the loss from Fresnel diffraction at the top, anti-reflection (AR) layer can be coated.…”