We introduce two major large-scale EC-funded initiatives to provide European researchers and companies with access to highly-advanced photonics technology supply chains from prototyping, to upscaling, and manufacturing and to a variety of services that aim at facilitating the market readiness of their product innovation efforts.

Over the last decades, rare-earth-doped materials such erbium, holmium and thulium have been extensively studied as a cost-efficient solution for optical amplification and lasing on the silicon photonic platform. When combined with suitable host medium and integrated circuit design, rare-earth doped materials can be tailored into efficient and low-noise integrated devices such as waveguide amplifiers and lasers with relatively straightforward and cheap fabrication techniques. Despite their superior properties and potential, rare-earth-doped waveguide technology still remains relatively immature when it comes to the production of competitive building blocks for the silicon photonics industry. Further improvements, such as higher gain, scalable fabrication process and lower deposition temperatures need to be pursued for ultimate cost-efficiency and silicon photonic circuit compatibility. In this work, we present a novel waveguide amplifier design that combines silicon nitride strip waveguides and multiple spatially engineered erbium-doped active layers to improve the gain characteristics of hybrid waveguide amplifiers fabricated on silicon with cost-effective and mass-scalable methods. By spatially controlling the erbium-ion distribution of the proposed multilayer waveguide amplifier such that it matches the transverse intensity distribution of the fundamental mode propagating within the device, we show up to 30% enhanced optical gain when compared to an amplifier design that utilizes only a single gain layer. The design, enabled by atomic layer deposition, opens a completely new approach in developing silicon-integrated waveguide amplifiers and lasers with as high efficiency extracted from the active section as possible.

We present a novel, low loss, integrated photonic platform based on silicon oxynitride (SiON) channel waveguides, capable to manage a wide range of VIS-NIR wavelengths for both linear and nonlinear optics applications. The proposed platform shows promising properties for a wide range of applications in on-chip sensing, LIDAR and integrated quantum photonic technologies. The propagation losses of the realized waveguides, characterized in a linear regime, are below 1.8 dB/cm at a wavelength of 800nm. The nonlinear optical properties of the platform have been characterized, in the wavelength range from 740nm to 840nm, by studying the broadening of picosecond laser pulses in Self-Phase-Modulation process. The resulting nonlinear coefficient n2 varies between 6 and 14 x 10^(-20) m^2/W within the studied spectral range, showing a clear increasing trend while approaching the half value of the silicon oxynitride band gap (Eg~4eV).

This conference presentation, “European Photonics and PIC pilot lines: EC view” was presented at the Integrated Photonics Platforms II conference at SPIE Photonics Europe 2022.

We highlight the rationale, lessons learnt, best practices, and impact of three pan-European initiatives that aim at supporting European companies and researchers with access to highly-advanced photonics technology and expertise.

PIXAPP, the world’s first open-access Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) Assembly and Packaging Pilot line provides companies with standardised packaging solutions along the entire supply chain for prototyping and pilot-scale production.

JePPIX has integrated design, production and test for quality, reproducible, high-performance PICs. We show how manufacturing-grade process design kits created with in-line metrology are configured for test automation and accelerated time-to-market.

The InSiDe H2020 project aims to develop a LDV based handheld cardiovascular screening device and show clinical feasibility. The device uses a Silicon-on-Insulator multi-beam Mach-Zehnder interferometer operating at 1310nm.

We present the progress of NEBULA project that is targeting the development of BTO based plasmonic modulators in the O- and C- bands and a Neuro Augmented C-band Coherent Receiver.

This conference presentation, “Hydroptics: photonics sensing platform for process optimisation in the oil industry” was presented at the Integrated Photonics Platforms II conference at SPIE Photonics Europe 2022.