Silicon Nitride in Silicon Photonics

By D. Blumenthal, R. Heideman, D. Geuzebroek, A. Leinse, Chris G. H. Roeloffzen. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2018

429 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The silicon nitride (Si3N4) planar waveguide platform has enabled a broad class of low-loss planar-integrated devices and chip-scale solutions that benefit from transparency over a wide wavelength range (400–2350 nm) and fabrication using wafer-scale processes. As a complimentary platform to silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and III–V photonics, Si3N4 waveguide technology opens up a new generation of system-on-chip applications not achievable with the other platforms alone. The availability of low-loss waveguides (<1 dB/m) that can handle high optical power can be engineered for linear and nonlinear optical functions, and that support a variety of passive and active building blocks opens new avenues for system-on-chip implementations. As signal bandwidth and data rates continue to increase, the optical circuit functions and complexity made possible with Si3N4 has expanded the practical application of optical signal processing functions that can reduce energy consumption, size and cost over today’s digital electronic solutions. Researchers have been able to push the performance photonic-integrated components beyond other integrated platforms, including ultrahigh Q resonators, optical filters, highly coherent lasers, optical signal processing circuits, nonlinear optical devices, frequency comb generators, and biophotonic system-on-chip. This review paper covers the history of low-loss Si3N4 waveguide technology and a survey of worldwide research in a variety of device and applications as well as the status of Si3N4 foundries.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1b280db6e7533b7193358fdbddeaa6e82e0e3aaf

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

2022 Roadmap on integrated quantum photonics (2021, background): “(a) PIC platforms:While silicon-based photonics has been the workhorse for QPICs owing to the low waveguide loss and the existing foundry infrastructure, other material platforms have been developed to further extend the capabilities beyond what silicon can offer [13], including III–V semiconductors”
Photonic matrix multiplication lights up photonic accelerator and beyond (2022, neutral): “The semiconductor optical ampli ﬁ ers were also demonstrated for all-optical activation functions 158 – 161 .”
Review of Silicon Photonics Technology and Platform Development (2021, background): “Silicon Nitride (SiN) is a CMOS-compatible material for the photonic integrated circuits (PICs) [58], and can provide”