Abstract
Co-integrating CMOS plasmonics and photonics became the “sweet spot” to hit in order to combine their benefits and allow for volume manufacturing of plasmo-photonic integrated circuits. Plasmonics can naturally interface photonics with electronics while offering strong mode confinement, enabling in this way on-chip data interconnects when tailored to single-mode waveguides, as well as high-sensitivity biosensors when exposing Surface-Plasmon-Polariton (SPP) modes in aqueous environment. Their synergy with low-loss photonics can tolerate the high plasmonic propagation losses in interconnect applications, offering at the same time a powerful portfolio of passive photonic functions towards avoiding the use of bulk optics for SPP excitation and facilitating compact biosensor setups. The co-integration roadmap has to proceed, however, over the utilization of fully CMOS compatible material platforms and manufacturing processes in order to allow for a practical deployment route. Herein, we demonstrate for the first time Aluminum plasmonic waveguides co-integrated with Si3N4 photonics using CMOS manufacturing processes. We validate the data carrying credentials of CMOS plasmonics with 25 Gb/s data traffic and we confirm successful plasmonic propagation in both air and water-cladded waveguide configurations. This platform can potentially fuel the deployment of co-integrated plasmonic and photonic structures using CMOS processes for biosensing and on-chip interconnect applications.
Highlights
Co-integrating CMOS plasmonics and photonics became the “sweet spot” to hit in order to combine their benefits and allow for volume manufacturing of plasmo-photonic integrated circuits
TiN-based plasmonic counterparts have demonstrated a strong dependence of their performance to the applied manufacturing conditions and the substrate material platform[13], resulting in Lspp lengths that can be much lower than those obtained by using noble metals when strong mode confinement is targeted[10]
E-beam lithography has been used for the fabrication of Al plasmonic stripes in the preparation of the first samples in order to ensure high lithographic resolution and high accuracy in critical dimensions of plasmonic stripes, prior proceeding to the transfer of the entire fabrication process in the same CMOS foundry where optical lithography was used for both photonic and plasmonic structures in the preparation of a second run of samples
Summary
Co-integrating CMOS plasmonics and photonics became the “sweet spot” to hit in order to combine their benefits and allow for volume manufacturing of plasmo-photonic integrated circuits. Plasmonics can naturally interface photonics with electronics while offering strong mode confinement, enabling in this way on-chip data interconnects when tailored to single-mode waveguides, as well as highsensitivity biosensors when exposing Surface-Plasmon-Polariton (SPP) modes in aqueous environment Their synergy with low-loss photonics can tolerate the high plasmonic propagation losses in interconnect applications, offering at the same time a powerful portfolio of passive photonic functions towards avoiding the use of bulk optics for SPP excitation and facilitating compact biosensor setups. We validate the data carrying credentials of CMOS plasmonics with 25 Gb/s data traffic and we confirm successful plasmonic propagation in both air and water-cladded waveguide configurations This platform can potentially fuel the deployment of co-integrated plasmonic and photonic structures using CMOS processes for biosensing and on-chip interconnect applications. Al holds the promise of being widely adopted in several applications with operating wavelengths spanning from visible to infrared regime
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