CEA-Leti to Coordinate EC Silicon Photonics Project

CEA-Leti will coordinate a four-year project aimed at building a European-based supply chain in silicon photonics and speeding up industrialization of the technology.

The €10.2 million PLAT4M (Photonic Libraries and Technology for Manufacturing) European Commission project includes 15 European R&D institutes and CMOS companies, industrial and research organizations in design and packaging, and end users in different application fields to bring the existing silicon photonics research platform to a level that enables seamless transition to industry.

“Silicon with its mature integration platform has brought electronic circuits to mass market applications — our vision is that silicon photonics will follow this evolution,” said project coordinator Laurent Fulbert. “Upgrading existing platforms to become compatible with industrialization is now essential. The PLAT4M partners bring a critical combination of expertise to the challenge of building a complete supply chain for commercializing silicon photonics in Europe.”

Silicon photonics research has grown rapidly, but most of the R&D has been devoted to developing elementary building blocks, rather than fabricating the complete photonic integrated circuits needed to support large potential markets — such as telecom and datacom, gas sensing, lidar and vibrometry.

PLAT4M aims to:

Prepare the supply chain, from chip-level technology to packaged circuits
Make integration technologies accessible to users in a fabless model
Help develop a design environment for convergence of photonics and electronics
Concentrate efforts on new products and new users, rather than the technology level
Retain its optoelectronics integration in Europe, with little added value in offshore assembly

The supply chain will be based on the technology platforms for Leti, imec and STMicroelectronics, supported by a unified design environment.

For more information, visit: www.leti.fr/en