Silica-on-Silicon PLC
Producing PLC wafers and chips that maximize production capacity.
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High performance and high production

Our world-leading planar lightwave circuit (PLC) fabrication facility produces wafer-level and chip-level components for the majority of the world’s telecommunications networks. We build these multi-layered photonic devices through a combination of processes – flame hydrolysis deposition and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition – to achieve both high performance and high production capacity.

To produce our 8-inch silica-on-silicon PLC wafer, we first apply a layer of doped silica glass on top of an 8-inch silicon wafer to form the waveguide ‘core’ layer. This is then photolithographically exposed and etched, using standard semiconductor processing techniques, to leave behind free-standing patterned waveguide structures corresponding to the final device. Finally, a further ‘cladding’ layer is applied, encapsulating the patterned waveguide within glass.

The refractive index contrast between the core and cladding with silica-on-silicon technology is typically only 1-2%, which is far lower than with most other photonic integrated circuit (PIC) fabrication technologies. This has two important advantages:

  • The propagation losses within the waveguide are very low at <0.03 dBcm-1.
  • The refractive index of the core layer is very close to that of silica optical fiber, which can be easily and effectively butt-coupled with interface losses <0.3dB.

This means silica PLC devices provide the lowest insertion loss of all PIC technologies – a critical parameter in all telecommunications networks. We use 8-inch wafers to maximize the number of devices obtained from each wafer, ensuring the highest capacity at the lowest prices.

Arrayed Waveguide Gratings (AWGs)

Our silica-on-silicon planar lightwave circuit (PLC) fabrication on 8-inch wafers provides the lowest insertion loss of all photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technologies – critical in all telecommunications networks – while ensuring maximum capacity, cost-effectively. 

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Silica-on-Silicon PLC

Athermalization

Our athermalization technology enables cost-effective, reliable and truly passive operation of PLC devices in DWDM networks, across a wide temperature range with no power needed.

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Silica-on-Silicon PLC

Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI)

Allowing for less strict tolerances on other components in the network, our patented Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) technology reduces costs, while providing low insertion loss with high channel uniformity and reliability. 

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Silica-on-Silicon PLC

Bidirectional AWG (cyclic)

Our bidirectional cyclic AWGs dramatically reduce the amount of fiber needed to deploy a network and halves the number of AWGs required. 

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Silica-on-Silicon PLC