Anneal-free ultra-low loss silicon nitride integrated photonics

Debapam Bose; Mark W. Harrington; Andrei Isichenko; Kaikai Liu; Jiawei Wang; Nitesh Chauhan; Zachary L. Newman; Daniel J. Blumenthal

doi:10.1038/s41377-024-01503-4

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Anneal-free ultra-low loss silicon nitride integrated photonics

Original Articles

- Anneal-free ultra-low loss silicon nitride integrated photonics
- Light: Science & Applications Vol. 13, Issue 8, Pages: 1565-1577(2024)
- Affiliations：
  
  1.Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
  2.Octave Photonics, Louisville, CO 80027, USA
- Author bio：
  
  Daniel J Blumenthal (danb@ucsb.edu)
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1038/s41377-024-01503-4
  CLC：
- Published：31 August 2024，
  
  Published Online：08 July 2024，
  
  Received：15 February 2024，
  
  Revised：01 June 2024，
  
  Accepted：10 June 2024
- Accepted：
Scan QR Code
Bose, D. et al. Anneal-free ultra-low loss silicon nitride integrated photonics. Light: Science & Applications, 13, 1565-1577 (2024).
DOI：

Bose, D. et al. Anneal-free ultra-low loss silicon nitride integrated photonics. Light: Science & Applications, 13, 1565-1577 (2024). DOI： 10.1038/s41377-024-01503-4.

摘要

Abstract

Heterogeneous and monolithic integration of the versatile low-loss silicon nitride platform with low-temperature materials such as silicon electronics and photonics

Ⅲ–Ⅴ compound semiconductors

lithium niobate

organics

and glasses has been inhibited by the need for high-temperature annealing as well as the need for different process flows for thin and thick waveguides. New techniques are needed to maintain the state-of-the-art losses

nonlinear properties

and CMOS-compatible processes while enabling this next generation of 3D silicon nitride integration. We report a significant advance in silicon nitride integrated photonics

demonstrating the lowest losses to date for an anneal-free process at a maximum temperature 250 ℃

with the same deuterated silane based fabrication flow

for nitride and oxide

for an order of magnitude ra

nge in nitride thickness without requiring stress mitigation or polishing. We report record low anneal-free losses for both nitride core and oxide cladding

enabling 1.77 dB m

-1

loss and 14.9 million Q for 80 nm nitride core waveguides

more than half an order magnitude lower loss than previously reported sub 300 ℃ process. For 800 nm-thick nitride

we achieve as good as 8.66 dB m

−1

loss and 4.03 million Q

the highest reported Q for a low temperature processed resonator with equivalent device area

with a median of loss and Q of 13.9 dB m

−1

and 2.59 million each respectively. We demonstrate laser stabilization with over 4 orders of magnitude frequency noise reduction using a thin nitride reference cavity

and using a thick nitride micro-resonator we demonstrate OPO

over two octave supercontinuum generation

and four-wave mixing and parametric gain with the lowest reported optical parametric oscillation threshold per unit resonator length. These results represent a significant step towards a uniform ultra-low loss silicon nitride homogeneous and heterogeneous platform for both thin and thick waveguides capable of linear and nonlinear photonic circuits and integration with low-temperature materials and processes.

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Keywords

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