Heterogeneous integration of silicon nitride and amorphous silicon carbide photonics

Amorphous silicon carbide (a-SiC) has emerged as a compelling candidate for applications in integrated photonics, known for its high refractive index, high optical quality, high thermo-optic coefficient, and strong third-order nonlinearities. Furthermore, a-SiC can be easily deposited via CMOS-compatible chemical vapor deposition (CVD) techniques, allowing for precise thickness control and adjustable material properties on arbitrary substrates. Silicon nitride (SiN) is an industrially well-established and well-matured platform, which exhibits ultra-low propagation loss, but it is suboptimal for high-density reconfigurable photonics due to the large minimum bending radius and constrained tunability. In this work, we monolithically combine the a-SiC with SiN photonics, leveraging the merits of both platforms, and achieve the a-SiC/SiN heterogeneous integration with an on-chip interconnection loss of (0.28+0.44−0.28) dB and integration density increment exceeding 4444-fold. By implementing active devices on the a-SiC, we achieve 27 times higher thermo-optic tuning efficiency, with respect to the SiN photonic platform. In addition, the a-SiC/SiN platform gives the flexibility to choose the optimal fiber-to-chip coupling strategy depending on the interfacing platform, with efficient side-coupling on SiN and grating-coupling on the a-SiC platform. The proposed a-SiC/SiN photonic platform can foster versatile applications in programmable and quantum photonics, nonlinear optics, and beyond.