News: Optoelectronics
3 June 2021
Sivers Photonics, Imec and ASM AMICRA achieve wafer-scale integration of InP DFB lasers
Sivers Semiconductors AB of Kista, Sweden says that its subsidiary Sivers Photonics (formerly CST Global of Glasgow, Scotland, UK) has reached a significant milestone, together with its partners nanoelectronics research centre imec of Leuven, Belgium and ASM AMICRA Microtechnologies GmbH of Regensburg, Germany. In their joint silicon photonics project, they have achieved the wafer-scale integration of indium phosphide (InP) distributed feedback (DFB) lasers from Sivers’ InP100 platform onto imec’s silicon photonics platform (iSiPP). It is reckoned that this will be able to boost the adoption of silicon photonics in a wide range of applications from optical interconnects, through light detection & ranging (LiDAR), to biomedical sensing.
Silicon itself does not emit light efficiently, due to the lack of efficient on‐chip light sources many silicon photonic systems currently still rely on external light sources made of III-V semiconductors such as indium phosphide (InP) or gallium arsenide (GaAs) typically implemented as separately packaged components. These off‐chip lasers often suffer from higher coupling losses, a large physical footprint and high packaging cost.
Sivers Photonics and imec tackled this challenge by using ASM AMICRA’s latest NANO flip-chip bonder tool to efficiently enable reproduceable coupling of more than 10mW of laser power into the silicon from the DFB laser.
“The availability of tailored InP laser sources, designed and fabricated on our InP100 manufacturing platform, will boost the adoption of silicon photonic circuits for a wide variety of commercial applications,” reckons Sivers Photonics’ managing director Billy McLaughlin.
Sivers, imec and ASM AMICRA can now extend silicon photonic prototyping with additional functionality, allowing their joint customers to develop photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with capabilities beyond what is possible today, it is reckoned. Silicon photonic products will account for about half of all integrated optical devices by 2026, at $30bn over this period, forecasts market research firm LightCounting in May in its ‘Integrated Optical Devices Report’. This widespread adoption of silicon photonic products will impact across several key application areas, such as datacom, telecom and optical sensing, it is reckoned.
