Electronic-photonic Wafer-level Technologies for Fast Prototyping and Application Specific Solutions

Silicon based photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technologies have gained increasing attention for a wide range of applications like high data rate communication or optical sensing. A common challenge for all PIC platforms is their efficient combination with high performance digital and analogue integrated circuit technologies like CMOS or SiGe-BiCMOS. In this paper, we present a specific development approach consisting of different levels for offering and accessing a wide range of flavors and modules of PIC technologies based on 8’ wafer level processes which allow flexible module developments towards a completely monolithic integration into high performance electronic PIC (ePIC) platforms. Passive photonic devices and modules are offered with a high flexibility of process adaptation. Moreover these photonic modules can be combined with electrical active components like photodetectors and modulators embedded in a CMOS compatible interconnect back-end-of-line process flow. Final level of development and integration is an ePIC platform consisting of high performance SiGe-BiCMOS in conjunction with photonic components. At this level certain requirements of the process-design-kit environment needs to be addressed to enable a sufficient electro-optical-analogue- mixed-signal (eoams) design and integrated circuits. We present examples following this development progress, flexible access, integration requirements and application examples for different devices and modules.