State-of-the-art nanofabrication processes for manufacturing integrated photonic devices based on silicon nitride

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The photonic industry is following into the footsteps of microelectronic manufacturers by exploring how to increase the level of integration of optical products in order to reduce the cost of current optical interconnects. This has led to the development of silicon photonics, which takes advantage of the state-of-the-art fabrication processes and massive capital investment made by the microelectronic industry to produce affordable components. Implementing efficient optical functionalities with materials originally developed to build and package electronic circuits is challenging. To address this issue, AEPONYX is developing a microfabricated platform that combines integrated optical components based on silicon nitride with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Preliminary studies have clearly shown that the bottleneck of such a technology is related to the nanofabrication processes used for manufacturing these integrated photonic devices. In this context, the team composed of researchers from INRS, UQAM and AEPONYX proposes to push the limits of nanofabrication technologies (electron beam lithography and nanometer pattern transfer) in order to (i) control the critical dimensions and the sidewall profiles of integrated photonic devices at the nanoscale level, (ii) minimize the sidewall roughness of the waveguides, and (iii) develop a robust and reliable nanofabrication process at the lowest cost. Validation of such an optimized nanofabrication process will be performed by manufacturing dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) filters arranged in an 8-channel wavelength selective optical filter insensitive to polarization and compatible with the wavelength channel allocation specified in the ITU G.989.2 NG-PON2 standard. The results of the investigation performed in the proposed project will directly impact the quality and the pace at which products based on MEMS and integrated optics will be able to be mass manufactured by AEPONYX and its industrial collaborators C2MI, Teledyne Dalsa and IBM.