A platform for silicon-on-insulator nanophotonics on industrial CMOS tools

Silicon nanophotonics has established itself as a promising technology to scale up photonic integrated circuits in functionality, integration, while reducing size and cost. However, the main requirement for a widespread application is the availability of a commercial manufacturing route. Leveraging the expertise and technology of CMOS electronics can provide a short-cut for the deployment of silicon nanophotonics. Deep-UV fabricated photonic wires in Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) have already been demonstrated to perform equally or better than their e-beam fabricated counterparts [1]. Also, working photonic crystal devices have been demonstrated with this technology [2]. Using lithography at 193nm instead of 248nm has already been shown to improve device quality [3], with photonic crystal waveguides with acceptable propagation losses [4].