OPTOELECTRONICS Advancing silicon photonic development
with WAVE process design kits Silicon photonics (SiPh) holds enormous potential to transform industries ranging from telecommunications and data centres to medical diagnostics and environmental sensing. However, the access and the sophisticated process required for its commercial
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vercoming variations in manufacturing and ensuring consistency in
performance are critical hurdles that must be addressed. Against this backdrop, WAVE Photonics aims to offer a practical solution. Over the past few years, WAVE Photonics’ work, supported by CORNERSTONE, has steadily helped advance access to SiPh by developing dependable, high-performance Process Design Kits (PDKs) that mitigate manufacturing inconsistencies while expediting the overall development timeline.
The role of CORNERSTONE CORNERSTONE’s contribution to this collaboration has been both foundational and ongoing. Operating with a clear, structured process and an openness to supporting small-scale projects, CORNERSTONE has provided an accessible platform through which pioneering SiPh designs can be rigorously tested and validated.
Its multi-project wafer approach offers a low barrier to entry – an essential feature for companies like WAVE Photonics that are breaking new ground on limited budgets. The foundry’s capacity to deliver multiple rapid iterations of wafer runs has enabled the necessary data sharing and computational models that underpin WAVE Photonics’ PDKs. This synergy accelerates the development cycle and ensures that the resulting technology is robust enough for high-volume production.
The wider impact of collaboration The initial partnership between WAVE Photonics and CORNERSTONE, began early in WAVE Photonics’ history and helped to lay the groundwork for its PDK development. This process involved using CORNERSTONE’s multi-project wafer (MPW) services to thoroughly test and verify its computational models. Real-world fabrication feedback
performance and ensuring the PDKs could reliably handle manufacturing variation – an issue that typically hampers SiPh scalability and yield.
“CORNERSTONE has played a key role in enabling our technology. The multi-project wafer service gave us the ability to validate our models in a real fabrication setting, and the openness to share data has been vital. Without that access and collaboration, we wouldn’t have been able to prove our approach to PDK development.” Says James Lee, co-founder, WAVE Photonics By leveraging CORNERSTONE’s cost- effective, low-barrier access to fabrication, WAVE Photonics has demonstrated how sophisticated modelling can translate into production-ready design kits that perform well at scale. This is particularly notable when compared to standard PDKs, which often fall short under high-volume
36 SEPTEMBER 2025 | ELECTRONICS FOR ENGINEERS conditions.
Beyond conventional SiPh applications, WAVE Photonics sees a future opportunity in sectors such as medical diagnostics and environmental sensing, where rapid prototyping and adaptability are vital. Having grown from a small start-up into a 16-person team, the company is now well positioned to accelerate SiPh development and adoption – with CORNERSTONE continuing to play a key supporting role.
WAVE Photonics: Driving high-yield SiPh production
WAVE Photonics leverages its proprietary design technology to develop comprehensive, state-of-the-art PDKs for a broad range of applications, helping to improve the development and, therefore, adoption of SiPh.
Its PDKs are designed to account for fabrication variations, helping to
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