A Grating-Coupler-Enabled CMOS Photonics Platform

We have developed a silicon photonics platform that allows monolithic integration with electronic circuits in a CMOS-compatible process. In this platform, vertical couplers are found to be a superior solution compared to traditional edge-coupling techniques. Grating couplers are an essential element in developing the optical wafer-scale test infrastructure, which in turn, enables the development of the photonic device library. The photonic devices were assembled into a 4 x 10 Gb/s transceiver die that also contains modulator drive, control, and receive electronics.