Imec Demonstrates 28Gb/s Silicon Photonics Platform

At the recent Integrated Photonics Research, Silicon and Nanophotonics Conference (IPR, San Diego, July 13-16, 2014), imec demonstrated improved performance of various key building blocks for high-density low-power wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical interconnects in silicon.

The achievements are an important milestone for imec’s fully integrated silicon photonics platform (iSiPP25G) for high-performance optical transceivers, extending the performance towards 28Gb/s and beyond.

Imec has demonstrated, at wafer-scale, a ring-based Wavelength-Division Multiplexing filter with an improved thermo-optic tuning efficiency better than 1nm/mW per channel, a thermally tunable 28Gb/s ring modulator with an efficiency of 260pm/mW and a high-speed germanium photodetector achieving an average responsitivity of 0.85A/W, and opto-electrical bandwidth of 50GHz with dark currents at –1.0V below 50nA. The devices are all integrated on imec’s iSiPP25G platform and extend imec’s Si photonics portfolio, also including low-loss (<2.5dB/cm) strip waveguides, highly efficient grating couplers (2.5dB insertion loss), 25Gb/s Mach-Zehnder modulators and more.

“Imec’s Silicon Photonics platform provides 28Gb/s performance for integrated photonics circuits for telecom and datacom industries. Companies can benefit from our silicon photonics capability through established standard cells, or explore the functionality of their own designs in Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) runs,” said Philippe Absil, program director at imec. “Through our MPW offer, fabless R&D teams can access a cost-efficient silicon photonics solution, with state-of-the-art performance, design flexibility and superior CD and thickness control.”