CMOS-compatible photonic integrated circuits on thin-film ScAlN
Abstract
Scandium aluminum nitride (ScAlN) has recently emerged as an attractive material for integrated photonics due to its favorable nonlinear optical properties and compatibility with CMOS fabrication. Despite the promising and versatile material properties, it is still an outstanding challenge to realize low-loss photonic circuits on thin-film ScAlN-on-insulator wafers. Here, we present a systematic study on the material quality of sputtered thin-film ScAlN produced in a CMOS-compatible 200 mm line, and an optimized fabrication process to yield 400 nm thick, fully etched waveguides. With surface polishing and annealing, we achieve micro-ring resonators with an intrinsic quality factor as high as , corresponding to a propagation loss of 2.4 dB/cm. These results serve as a critical step towards developing future large-scale, low-loss photonic integrated circuits based on ScAlN.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2403.14212,
title = {CMOS-compatible photonic integrated circuits on thin-film ScAlN},
author = {Sihao Wang and Veerendra Dhyani and Sakthi Sanjeev Mohanraj and Xiaodong Shi and Binni Varghese and Wing Wai Chung and Ding Huang and Zhi Shiuh Lim and Qibin Zeng and Huajun Liu and Xianshu Luo and Victor Leong and Nanxi Li and Di Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.14212},
year = {2024}
}