HELIOS program develops complete supply chain for integrating photonics with CMOS

Grenoble, France--The just-completed HELIOS program, which consisted of 20 European institutions and commercial outfits cooperating to create a supply chain in Europe for silicon (Si) photonics on CMOS, has indeed produced the intended complete supply chain, according to CEA-Leti, a member of HELIOS. Launched by the European Commission in 2008, the €8.5 million project was coordinated by Leti.

HELIOS has also demonstrated a complete design flow in which the designs of both Si-photonics devices and electronic/photonic systems are integrated in a framework compatible with the European Defence Agency (EDA).

CEA-Leti noted that Europe is now positioned to design and manufacture volume Si-photonics devices.

Time to move fast
"The technology roadmap of silicon photonics becomes clearer now," says Thomas Skordas, head of the European Commission’s photonics unit. "Europe will have to move fast to become competitive in this new field. Strategies for the industrialization of silicon photonics are currently being discussed in the context of Horizon 2020, the EU's new framework program for research and innovation for 2014-2020."

HELIOS focused on developing essential building blocks like efficient optical sources (Si-based and heterogeneous integration of III-V on Si), integrated lasers, and high-speed modulators and photodetectors. The project also combined and packaged these building blocks to demonstrate complex functions.

These include a 10 Gbit/s modulator integrated with an electronic BiCMOS driver, a 16x10 Gbit/s transceiver for wavelength-division-multiplexing passive-optical-network (WDM-PON) applications, a photonic QAM-10 Gbit/s wireless transmission system, and a mixed analog-and-digital transceiver module for multifunction antennas.

Better than spec
The performance of these building blocks led to some results that exceeded original specifications, such as:

• High-performance passive devices including rib/strip waveguide transitions with less than 0.2 dB losses, grating couplers with 1.6 dB losses, inverted taper couplers with 1 dB losses, and arrayed-waveguide-grating (AWG) and microring-based demultiplexers

• Wafer-level integration of lasers by hybrid III-V/Si bonding, leading to the demonstration of single-mode operation with 3 dBm output power, 30 dB side-mode-suppression ratio (SMSR), and a laser threshold current of less than 35 mA for continuous-wave operation

• 40G carrier-depletion Si modulators demonstrated in Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), ring, slow-wave, and interdigitated modulator configurations

• An integrated tunable laser/Mach-Zehnder modulator working at 10 Gbit/s

For more info, see www.helios-project.eu.