Singapore--A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics (IME) and the University of Washington will join forces to provide shared silicon photonic processes. As part of the Optoelectronics Systems Integration in Silicon program (OpSIS) program at the University of Washington, the partnership will help the research and development (R&D) community significantly reduce the fabrication cost of silicon photonic integrated circuits.

Hosted in the University of Washington’s Institute for Photonic Integration, OpSIS is a new foundry service to facilitate R&D in silicon photonics technology. Under this partnership, IME will provide its in-house silicon photonics platform technology together with its fabrication and integration expertise in multi-gigahertz photonic devices. Such devices include integrated optical modulators and photodetectors, edge-couplers, waveguides, array waveguide gratings (AWGs), bends, couplers, ring resonators, splitters, multimode interferometers (MMIs), add/drop filters, crossing, and rotators. In return, the OpSIS team at the University of Washington will contribute to IME’s silicon photonics device library, a series of very high-bandwidth devices that includes photodetectors and modulators at speeds in excess of 20 GHz.

Silicon photonic integrated circuits to be created under this program will be immediately available to the photonic research community worldwide, and in the process facilitate technological advancements and proliferate creative ideas for the development of the next-generation devices. As the platform will be offered through multi-project wafer (MPW) runs, which allow users from multiple projects to share the costs of a single fabrication run, research costs are lowered significantly for individual projects.  

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