SPEAKER PROFILE



Amir Ghadimi
CSEM SA, Neuchâtel

Switzerland

An open access foundry for electro-optics and nonlinear PIC platform based on lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI)

Abstract

Lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) is one of the most promising emerging platforms for photonics integrated circuits (PICs) that comprises a unique set of interesting optical properties such as: a high electro-optic coefficient, high intrinsic 2nd and 3rd order nonlinearities, and a large transparency window (350nm - 5500nm). Recent advancements in bonding of single crystal thin films of lithium niobate onto silicon substrates (LNOI), has opens a new avenue to explore the advantages of lithium niobate in the context of PICs and to benefit from their miniaturization, cost reduction, scalable manufacturing, and integration. This ultimately enables designing complex PICs with tens of components in a millimeters-size chip benefiting a wide range of applications including quantum technologies, telecom, LiDAR and sensing.
However, so far, LNOI technology has been limited to few academic groups around the world. This is mainly because currently there are no PIC foundry that offers LNOI technology as standard platform to the industry. Establishing a reliable, high yield fabrication process for LNOI PICs is the key to ensure wide spread of this novel technology. CSEM is set to establish an open PIC foundry based on LNOI platform based on a well-tested process design kit (PDK) library. Here, we present our first results toward this goal and demonstrate a high-yield 150mm wafer scale fabrication technology for low-loss LNOI waveguides at two wavelengths: 1550nm and 780nm that demonstrate losses <0.2dB/cm. We also present our first experimental results on f-2f laser stabilization using LNOI waveguides and initial results on few PDK components such as low-V? modulators.


Bio

Dr. Amir H. Ghadimi is currently an expert/team leader at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Micro/nano technology (CSEM). He is leading the efforts at CSEM in the areas of PICs and PIC based sensing where together with his team they are developing a PIC platform-based lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) as well as hybrid integration schemes. He is also the coordinator of several large national and international projects such as the H2020 project ELENA, which aims at developing the first open access European LNOI platform and open foundry.

He obtains his PhD. degree in electrical engineering in 2018 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). He is the recipient of several awards and grants such as Swiss national funding (SNF) Sinergia grant (2021), SNF Bridge discovery grant (2020), Swiss Physical Society (SPS) 2019 young scientist award, Swiss Nanotechnology best PhD award (2018) and European frequency and time forum (EFTF) best paper award (2018). His research interests are integrated photonics, quantum optics, quantum opto-mechanics, precision sensing, nonlinear photonics, and ultra-high speed microwave photonics.