Imec has announced that it and its partners have completed a three-year programme to make a variety of silicon photonics technologies accessible for industry and academia worldwide. Within the ESSenTIAL programme, funded by the European Commission, imec has worked to develop advanced multi-project-wafer services (MPW) and packaging services for silicon photonics.
Silicon photonics is a key enabling technology for a range of markets, and builds on the technology portfolio and economy of scale of CMOS fabs to manufacture sophisticated photonic integrated circuits with a combination of passive and active devices.
The ESSenTIAL program has expanded the services of ePIXfab, an alliance of European entities set up to support the emergence of a fabless silicon photonics ecosystem. ePIXfab claims it has provided affordable MPW services to fabless R&D teams worldwide that are developing photonic circuits.
"ePIXfab has helped to accelerate the field of silicon photonics and to let it move from a research field to a field of critical industrial importance," said Ghent University professor Roel Baets, one of the founders of ePIXfab and research team leader with imec.
Within the ESSenTIAL project, the portfolio of silicon photonics services offered by ePIXfab has been extended in many ways. High speed active devices were added to the MPW offering. In total over 200 silicon photonics circuit designs were prototyped by imec and its partners.
Pic: Professor Roel Baets
Author
Tom Austin-Morgan
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk