Highlights from “Integration of novel materials into silicon photonics” workshop

The workshop on the “Integration of novel materials into silicon photonics”, hosted by AMO on the 21st/22nd November 2022 in Aachen was a success, according to feedback received from numerous participants, asking if there is going to be another one next year.

Watch highlights from workshop in the video

The scope of the workshop was to present the recent advances of the field, and to discuss the possible advantages and challenges posed by different materials – from quantum dots, to perovskites, to 2D-materials, etc. – and by different integration strategies. The workshop included a session dedicated to the integration of 2D materials, in cooperation with the 2D-Experimental Pilot Line.

Scientific conclusions from the workshop are hard to summarize, given the variety of topics covered and the different priorities that people coming from different fields may have. From the viewpoint of POSEIDON one can single out InP as the technology to beat. The opto-electronic devices like lasers, phase modulators and detectors were already very good at the time of writing the POSEIDON proposal. However, significant progress has been made in the recent years on transfer printing of these materials or entire InP PICs. This technology can be the key development to scale the cost of InP integration down, which previously was the largest issue with this technology. Nevertheless, fabricating InP light sources is still a very demanding and complex process, which leaves an opportunity for cheaper light sources with less complex fabrication processes, as we are targeting in POSEIDON.

The workshop was organized by AMO GmBH (coordinator of POSEIDON) and supported by H2020 projects – POSEIDON, INSPIRE, MOCCA, PlasmoniAC, Graphene Flagship and #2DEPL, and by the German BMBF via the project NeuroSys Cluster.