FOCUS RESEARCH NEWS ORC £6m project to bring silicon photonics to mass market


Researchers from the University of Southampton in the UK have been awarded more than £6 million by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for a project to bring silicon photonics to the mass market. The Silicon Photonics for Future Systems project will address challenges in mass production of silicon photonics technology – which, if successfully commercialised, could revolutionise applications in computing, communications, domestic appliances and healthcare. Silicon photonics can transmit huge amounts of data at very high speeds with extremely low power, and is one of the most rapidly growing technologies. According to a report published in January by market research company Markets and Markets, the silicon photonics global market revenue is estimated to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 24.5 per cent to $410.78 million by 2020. However, despite significant progress, several key research challenges still need to be overcome to enable the mass production of silicon photonic technology. These challenges include developing: a low cost method of comprehensively testing at the wafer scale; a passive alignment coupling technique from fibre to optical chip; a means of scaling the functionality of the photonic circuit; very low power, high data rate modulators; and low- cost integrated lasers within silicon photonic chips.


The project aims to tackle these research challenges to enable a revolution in low-cost photonics, placing the UK at its centre. It is led by Professor Graham Reed from the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton.


‘Photonic communications technology, already so vital in core systems, currently stands at the


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threshold of the mass market,’ said Reed. ‘To make this vital transition it must exploit the mass-precision- processing technology developed for silicon microelectronics. We will place the UK at the forefront of this transition by bringing our


microelectronics and photonics skills together to address several remaining key research challenges for silicon photonics. ‘The key is that the technology must follow an aggressively low cost model, which implies that an


approach similar to that developed by the microelectronics industry is required for photonics. Therefore, if we are successful in tackling these challenges, the results will do nothing less than revolutionise the field.’


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