Low-Cost Access to Development and Manufacturing of Photonic Integrated Circuits

Generic photonic integration technology is rapidly gaining popularity. It applies the methodology that is so successful in microelectronics (CMOS technology) to the domain of photonics: providing low-cost access to highly standardized high-performance processes that support integration in a single chip of a set of building blocks like optical amplifiers, lasers, modulators, detectors and a variety of passive components like couplers, filters and wavelength demultiplexers. Using these building blocks Photonic ICs can be designed and fabricated for a broad range of applications, such as telecommunications, data communications, sensor technology, medical diagnostics and metrology. In the presentation it will be explained how the generic photonic foundry model leads to a dramatic reduction of R&D cost and time, by developing Photonic ICs in a well-established and characterised technology, by sharing the cost of the R&D runs with many users in so-called Multi-Project Wafer runs, by using libraries with accurate models for the building blocks and by designing the chips for low-cost generic packaging and testing. Further, it will be explained how to get access to this emerging technology.