May 2023
Spotlight Summary by Jack Smith
Foundry manufacturing of tight-confinement, dispersion-engineered, ultralow-loss silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits
This work presents an excellent example of the scaling up of foundry silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits (PICs), fabricated to a high specification and with high yield. Such devices constitute a crucial part of the next generation of advanced integrated optics technologies. Owing to its wide-bandgap, silicon nitride suffers less linear and non-linear optical absorption loss than silicon does, especially in the near-infrared telecommunication window. Therefore, it is an appealing material for integrated optics, provided high-optical quality silicon nitride PICs can be produced in a foundry, in large quantities and in a reproducible way. The authors of this Photonics Research article report their success in this context, by demonstrating near-infrared silicon nitride PICs suffering low linear propagation losses (2.6 dB/m) and including microring resonators with high Q-factors (1.4×107) with thicknesses above 800 nm, operating in the anomalous dispersion regime, and being produced with a yield near 100% across 6-inch wafers. The resultant silicon nitride PICs presented in this work are excellent examples in a rapidly advancing field in the integrated optics community.
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Article Information
Foundry manufacturing of tight-confinement, dispersion-engineered, ultralow-loss silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits
Zhichao Ye, Haiyan Jia, Zhangjun Huang, Chen Shen, Jinbao Long, Baoqi Shi, Yi-Han Luo, Lan Gao, Wei Sun, Hairun Guo, Jijun He, and Junqiu Liu
Photon. Res. 11(4) 558-568 (2023) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF