KEYWORDS: Waveguides, Microelectromechanical systems, Phase shifts, Liquid crystals, Silicon photonics, Silicon, Photonic integrated circuits, Electrodes, Oxides, Back end of line
The demand for efficient actuators in photonics has peaked with increasing popularity for large-scale general-purpose programmable photonics circuits. We present our work to enhance an established silicon photonics platform with low-power micro-electromechanical (MEMS) and liquid crystal (LC) actuators to enable largescale programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs).
We give an overview the progress of our work in silicon photonic programmable circuits, covering the technology stack from the photonic chip over the driver electronics, packaging technologies all the way to the software layers. On the photonic side, we show our recent results in large-scale silicon photonic circuits with different tuning technologies, including heaters, MEMS and liquid crystals, and their respective electronic driving schemes. We look into the scaling potential of these different technologies as the number of tunable elements in a circuit increases. Finally, we elaborate on the software routines for routing and filter synthesis to enable the photonic programmer.
We present our work in the European project MORPHIC to extend an established silicon photonics platform with low-power and non-volatile micro-electromechanical (MEMS) actuators to demonstrate large-scale programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs).
Silicon (Si) photonic micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), with its low-power phase shifters and tunable couplers, is emerging as a promising technology for large-scale reconfigurable photonics with potential applications for example in photonic accelerators for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. For silicon photonic MEMS devices, hermetic/vacuum packaging is crucial to the performance and longevity, and to protect the photonic devices from contamination. Here, we demonstrate a wafer-level vacuum packaging approach to hermetically seal Si photonic MEMS wafers produced in the iSiPP50G Si photonics foundry platform of IMEC. The packaging approach consists of transfer bonding and sealing the silicon photonic MEMS devices with 30 μm-thick Si caps, which were prefabricated on a 100 mm-diameter silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. The packaging process achieved successful wafer-scale vacuum sealing of various photonic devices. The functionality of photonic MEMS after the hermetic/vacuum packaging was confirmed. Thus, the demonstrated thin Si cap packaging shows the possibility of a novel vacuum sealing method for MEMS integrated in standard Si photonics platforms.
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