Tower and Quintessent partner on Foundry Silicon Photonics Platform

The new foundry process will build upon Tower’s PH18 production silicon photonics platform and add Quintessent’s III-V quantum dot-based lasers and optical amplifiers to enable a complete suite of active and passive silicon photonic elements. The resulting capability aims to demonstrate integrated optical gain in a standard foundry silicon photonics process. The initial process development kit (PDK) is planned in 2021, with multi-project wafer runs (MPWs) following in 2022. The co-integration of lasers and amplifiers with silicon photonics at the circuit element level will improve overall power efficiency, eliminate traditional design constraints such as on-chip loss budgets, simplify packaging, and make possible new product architectures and functionalities. For example, a silicon photonic transceiver or sensor product with integrated lasers will be capable of complete self-test at the chip or wafer level. These advantages are further enhanced by employing semiconductor quantum-dots as the active optical gain media, which enables devices with greater reliability, lower noise, and the ability to operate efficiently at higher temperatures. “Bringing the III-V laser diode within our silicon photonics platform will enable single chip photonic integrated circuit (PIC) design. This means that both III-V quantum dot amplifiers and lasers, and Tower’s silicon photonics passive and active elements, will be delivered by a foundry through a single MPW chip run,” said Dr. David Howard, Tower Semiconductor Executive Director and Fellow. “We are pleased to combine our quantum dot gain functionality with Tower’s proven silicon photonics process to enable a disruptive new capability. This platform has great potential to solve the connectivity bottleneck limiting AI training systems and disaggregated computing, among other applications,” said Dr. Alan Liu, co-founder and CEO of Quintessent.