Silicon with its mature integration platform has brought electronic circuits to mass-market applications. In silicon photonics the main effort is now directed towards upgrading existing platforms to become compatible with industrialisation requirements. Further to related technology advancements, the PLAT4M project has notably achieved a qualitative leap of the design flow, allowing the photonics community to design more complex and more robust circuits. In this respect the PLAT4M partners bring together a critical combination of expertise from research capabilities to key industrial organisation and end users, critical for commercialising silicon photonics in Europe covering the complete value chain.
This four-year FP7 project, launched in 2012 and funded by a European Commission grant of 10.2 million euros, has just recently announced the development of 3 new silicon photonics platforms. This notable progress was reached by demonstrating manufacturability of elementary devices and process integration, building a coherent design flow, and developing a packaging toolkit.
The supply chain is based on technology platforms by Leti, IMEC, and STMicroelectronics, supported by a unified design environment. The high level of maturity of the technology offered by these platforms makes them readily accessible to a broad circle of users in a fabless model.
Regarding design flow, the OpenAccess standard for data sharing for design-automation tools includes now an extension for silicon photonics, however still in a beta phase today. Simulation capabilities were leveraged thanks to an extensive characterization effort from the three partner fabs, statistical data gathered for variability prediction, and a study by Paris-Sud University for a time-efficient and precise modeling. Mentor Graphics and Phoenix Software partners have improved phase-aware routing and tool interoperability. Verification and manufacturability have reached industry-requirement standards thanks to the development of new techniques based upon the Calibre® platform. Mask preparation is also improving with better pattern density control and mask correction.
End-users like Polytec and Thales Research & Technology are driving the demonstrators development and assessing the use of silicon photonics in their application fields.
For more information, see the PLAT4M Project website and the included Press release.