21 July 2010
Silicon photonics device prototyping line established with Circles of Light EC research project
An important technical progress highly recognized by the European Commission has been established by AMO within the EC funded project Circles of Lights. The outcome is a prototype line for passive and active nanophotonic devices using silicon-on-insulator. The mentioned technology is emerging for exploitation in nanophotonics for two main reasons: It relies on CMOS technology and hence, there exist a lot of knowhow, standards and fabrication capacities which can be reused for photonic applications; furthermore, the silicon platform is superior concerning costs. The lithography performed by an electron beam writing tool (Vistec EBPG 5000) enables high resolution and accurate alignment for multi-layer lithography steps. Based on these competences AMO provides access to its silicon nanophotonic technology in CMOS environment for research partners and customers. An upcoming cooperation with the European network ePIXfab is supporting these exploitation efforts.
Within the Circles of Light project silicon ring-resonators have been fabricated additionally with soft UV Nanoimprint lithography demonstrating the feasibility to fabricate nanophotonic devices by UV Nanoimprint for the first time (see press release 2008). This proved the availability of a technology to produce photonic structures of silicon at low cost.
The Circles of Light project (09/2006 – 12/2009) contributed - numerous scientific publications – a total of 17 papers and 25 presentations at international conferences were published. The project consortium of universities (RWTH Aachen University (G), University of Surrey (UK)), SMEs (AMO GmbH (G), Silios Technologies (F)) and Industry (IBM Research GmbH, (CH)) represented the complete food-chain of innovation, from basic research at university labs and innovative small and medium enterprises to market driven global players.
