Feasibility study of on-chip Avalanche Photodetector

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The nature of the work is to conduct a feasibility study to design and fabricate a waveguide avalanchephotodiode on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. Silicon photonic devices built on silicon-on-insulatorwafer are micron scale, high refractive index contrast photonic devices truly integrable with electronic controlcircuits on a very-large-scale integration (VLSI) chip. Such devices are promised to prevail in the opticalcommunication industry for their low power consumption, small feature size, and low cost upon massproduction. ArtIC, a leading company in photonic integrated circuits (PIC), is planning to develop amonolithically integrated wavelength selectable receiver based on SOI platform for next generationwavelength division multiplexing (WDM) passive optical network (NG-PON2) applications. Waveguide basedAvalanche Photo-Detector (APD) is one of the key components for such device. Our group, with many years ofsilicon photonics device design and fabrication experiences, will collaborate with the company to develop thisproduct. Through this project, our group will design and fabricate the waveguide APD using facilities availableat PI's lab, University of Victoria and CMC microsystems. At the end of the project, we anticipate the APDwill be fully understood through numerical modelling and fabricated with fabrication related challengesidentified. In a continued collaboration through a long term project such as NSERC collaborative research anddevelopment (CRD), the waveguide APD is expected to be developed, characterized experimentally andverified to meet the requirement specified by ITU-G.980.2 for NG-PON2 market. The activity in this project ishighly related to the endeavor of the company to building SOI portfolio. The design/fabrication process of thewaveguide APD will be directly integrated to their transceiver design product line. This positions the companyas well as Canadian high tech industry at the frontlines of PON market whose value is predicted to be $43billion by 2025. The highly qualified personnels (HQPs) through this project training well suits the demand ofCanadian industry.