Abstract
Photonic integrated circuits have seen a dramatic increase in complexity over the past decades. This development has been spurred by recent applications in datacenter communications and enabled by the availability of standardized mature technology platforms. Mechanical movement of wave-guiding structures at the micro- and nanoscale provides unique opportunities to further enhance functionality and to reduce power consumption in photonic integrated circuits. We here demonstrate integration of MEMS-enabled components in a simplified silicon photonics process based on IMEC's Standard iSiPP50G Silicon Photonics Platform and a custom release process.
Highlights
T HE field of Silicon Photonics has been evolving rapidly over the past decades [1], and today’s advanced standardized technology platforms offered by specialized foundries, provide access to a broad catalog of high performance standardized library components [2]–[5]
In order to integrate Silicon Photonic MEMS devices in existing Silicon Photonics platforms, mechanical degrees of freedom have to be provided. This requires the selective removal of the cladding oxide around the silicon waveguides in certain areas on the photonic integrated circuit, which enables both movable structures as electrostatic actuation as described in section section III.A
While the results demonstrate the capability of the MEMS integration approach and the performance of selected MEMS components, the impact of this powerful technique extends far beyond the demonstrated devices, as it will enable photonic circuit designers with a powerful toolbox to conceive an entirely new class of integrated silicon photonic MEMS devices
Summary
T HE field of Silicon Photonics has been evolving rapidly over the past decades [1], and today’s advanced standardized technology platforms offered by specialized foundries, provide access to a broad catalog of high performance standardized library components [2]–[5]. The combination of high performance photonic components at very large scale allows in particular to conceive fully reconfigurable photonic integrated circuits [11]–[13], providing a path for generic or ‘field-programmable’ PICs, where a single physical photonic network on-chip can be dynamically reconfigured to address multiple functions [14] This approach lowers the entry barrier for access to stateof-the art high performance PIC technology, and promises at the same time a drastically reduced development time and associate cost reductions. While implementations of such programmable photonic integrated circuits have recently been demonstrated experimentally [15], they remain at small scale with up to a few tens of components only, limited by the inefficiency of the physical tuning mechanisms available in current PIC technology, such as the thermo-optic or the plasma dispersion effect. MEMS represent a mature technology, and can be readily integrated in existing technology platforms, reusing the full library of existing high-performance photonic components
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