BTO-silicon photonic integrated circuits for optical communications

The demand for continuous increase in the bandwidth of optical transceivers creates a need for technological innovation of photonic integrated circuits (PICs). In particular, the modulators are often the limiting electro-optic component. Silicon photonics has provided a scalable platform for small, cost-effective, and highly integrated PICs, but silicon-based modulators have limited bandwidth and relatively large insertion-loss.

Barium titanate (BTO) has emerged as a material for high-speed, low-loss electro-optic modulators that can be integrated into silicon photonic platforms. It is a stable oxide material, with large Pockels coefficients that can be produced on 300 mm wafers, which enables high-performance transmitter PICs with the same level of integration as silicon photonics.

This talk will review the work that has been done by various researchers to develop BTO as a photonic platform, including various device demonstrations, the integration with silicon photonics, and its potential for applications in different fields. It will also discuss the commercial 200 mm BTO-silicon platform that Lumiphase has developed and the recent PIC demonstrations.