At the halfway stage of a four year project intended to build a European-based supply chain in silicon photonics, PLAT4M says it has now developed three technology platforms and adds these are available to a range of fabless companies.At the halfway stage of a four year project intended to build a European-based supply chain in silicon photonics, PLAT4M says it has now developed three technology platforms and adds these are available to a range of fabless companies.
PLAT4M, which has received €10.2million of EC funding, brings together 15 companies, including European R&D institutes, CMOS companies, industrial and research organisations, and end users.
The supply chain is based on technology platforms from Leti, imec and STMicroelectronics, supported by a unified design environment.
Imec’s platform is based on SOI substrates with 220nm crystalline silicon on a 2µm buried oxide. During the project, the fabrication processes and integration flow have been fine tuned to have stable and repeatable performance for all photonics building blocks and the platform is already being used by Thales, Polytec and TNO.
Thales has demonstrated a coherent combination of laser beams and intends to produce high power, high energy laser sources for sensing, industry or fundamental physics.
Leti has developed a new photonic platform, based on 200mm SOI wafers. Multilevel silicon patterning allows the design of various passive and active devices with thermal tuning capability. Leti and III-V Lab have developed integrated hybrid III-V lasers and electro absorption modulators. A clear eye diagram has been achieved at 25Gbit/s, confirming strong potential for telecom applications, says the project.
Meanwhile, ST has developed a 300mm silicon photonic platform, which will be used as a proof of concept R&D tool. During its development, ST has demonstrated wavelength division multiplexing solutions, some of which are designed for the 100GBase-LR4 standard.
Author
Graham Pitcher
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk