200-mm silicon photonics technology development

Silicon photonics uses mature CMOS industry to design, manufacture and package photonic devices. It can break through the limitation of existing electrical technology in terms of cost, power consumption and integration, to meet the needs for future development of communication, data center, LiDAR, biosensor, quantum computing, etc. Although silicon photonics process is based on CMOS technology and facilities, a mature CMOS platform can not be seamlessly transformed into a silicon photonics platform, because there are great differences in device types and graphic characteristics between photonics and electrical integrated circuits. The key challenges and solutions in developing a manufacturable photonic technology were described in this paper. According to the difference of manufacturing process, a series of process modules for silicon photonics were developed on 200-mm CMOS platform, such as silicon deep-etch process for edge-coupling technology. An abundant device library for process design kit was established, including stripe waveguide, rib waveguide, grating coupler, MMI, directional coupling, waveguide crossing, AWG, MZ modulator, and photodetector. Meanwhile, Si3N4 material is also one of the important materials for future development of photonic integration. Through process optimization, the propagation loss of Si3N4 waveguide were approximately 0.2 dB/cm with thickness of 100 nm and 0.6 dB/cm with thickness of 400 nm, respectively. Automated wafer-level optical test was used to enable statistical photonic device characterization for development, photonic modeling, and manufacturing controls.