Project Aim
It is the aim of the project to bring the application of photonic integrated micro-systems in advanced products within reach for a broad class of SMEs by reducing their required investment costs by more than an order of magnitude. This will be done by developing a knowledge-based technology for production of Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) that will combine an increase in flexibility with a dramatic reduction of cost. It will lay the foundation for a breakthrough of PICs into a wide range of applications.
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Project Objectives
EuroPIC is a broadly based project, aiming to synthesise many of the functional components in the manufacturing chain. The project aims to:
• To bring the application of photonic integrated micro-systems with a high added value in advanced products within reach for a broad class of SMEs by reducing the entrance costs dramatically by more than one order of magnitude.
• To investigate novel technologies for extending the functionality supported by a basic manufacturing process.
• To develop a generic packaging approach that allows for packaging a variety of different PICs with a small set of standardized packages.
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Applications
Large reductions in R&D cycle time and chip manufacturing costs will lead to a large growth of the share of Application Specific PICs (ASPICs) in the photonic components market. So far the use of PICs has been mainly restricted to a few niche areas in high-end telecommunications applications, where their specific functionality cannot be met by competing technologies. With the expected cost reductions through a generic foundry approach they will also become competitive in high volume markets like the telecom access network, where they may be applied in the Central Office for integration of larger numbers of circuits that have to be repeated for each subscriber or group of subscribers.
Project Methodology: A foundry approach
EuroPIC builds on the groundwork of the JePPIX platform which started by offering small scale access to the COBRA generic integration process of the TU Eindhoven. This process is very useful for proof-of-concept experiments, but does not support reproducible fabrication of larger numbers of PICs with sufficient performance for practical applications.
The component manufacturing chain Key Tasks Within EuroPIC
Roadmap
The roadmap of microelectronics is focused on progress along the Moore’s law curve. In Photonics we expect a different development. It will start with commercial application of ASPICs with a complexity in the range of 5-50 components in rather basic generic foundry processes. The next step will be an increase in performance and capabilities of the generic processes, e.g. with respect to speed, power consumption and number of basic building blocks supported, which may lead to some increase in the complexity of the chips. Once the foundry processes cover a wide range of applications, their steady performance improvement will allow for designing increasingly complex chips.
User Group
EuroPIC invites interested parties to join its user group. The term user is applied broadly to any academic group or commercial company which has the potential for using PICs in its technology. Although EuroPIC is particularly interested in supporting SME users, the door is open to all interested parties.
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Programme Details and References
