New technique for terabit optical links between chips
The ‘photonic wire bonding’ developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology uses an etched polymer to make connections in the range of several terabits per second and is suited perfectly for production on the industrial scale. The technology could be used in high-performance emitter-receiver systems for optical data transmission and so reduce the energy consumption of the internet.
Development of high-performance optical emitters and receivers integrated on chips has already reached a high level. but there have not yet been any satisfactory ways of bridging the chips optically. “The biggest difficulty consists in aligning the chips precisely such that the waveguides meet,“ said Christian Koos, professor at KIT’s Institute of Photonics and Quantum Electronics (IPQ) and of Microstructure Technology (IMT).
The team tackled the problem from the other side: The researchers first fix the chips and then structure a polymer-based optical waveguide to fit. To adapt the interconnection to the position and orientation of the chip, the scientists developed a method for the three-dimensional structuring of an optical waveguide using a technique called two-photon polymerization for high resolution. A femtosecond laser writes the free-form waveguide structure directly into a polymer that is located on the surface of the chi and the KIT researchers used a laser lithography system made by the Nanoscribe company, a spinoff of KIT.
Prototypes of the photonic wire bonds reached very small losses and a very high transmission bandwidth in the range of infrared telecommunication wavelengths around 1.55µm and in the first experiments, the researchers saw data transmission rates of 5Tbit/s. Potential applications of photonic wire bonds lie in complex emitter-receiver systems for optical telecommunication as well as in sensor and measurement technology. As the highly precise orientation of the chips in manufacturing is no longer required, the process is particularly suited for the automatic production of large series. KIT researchers now plan to transfer this technology to industrial application in cooperation with partner companies.
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