Conference Agenda

Compute energy-delay performance is today communication limited. The scaling vectors of cost, bandwidth density and energy are challenged by the physical limits of electronic interconnect bandwidth. The emergence of foundry compatible silicon photonics solutions promises to relieve this roadblock with electronic-photonic integration at the package level. These solutions, as described in the recent release of the 2023 Integrated Photonics System Roadmap – International, will be review with a focus on materials, tools and processes for sustainable system performance scaling.

Silicon photonics subwavelength metamaterials have found use in of applications ranging from optical communications to sensing. In this invited talk, we review some of the latest advances in the field.

Photonic integrated biosensors have garnered considerable attention due to their promising applications in various fields such as healthcare. Differentiating specific targets from interfering background effects is a challenging task. In this work, a dual-polarization Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) with coherent phase readout is proposed to identify refractive index changes from different layers above the waveguide surface, thus improving sensor specificity. All the system building blocks have been designed for a 300 nm-thick silicon nitride platform, fabricated and characterized. The first experimental results show a bulk waveguide sensitivity of 0.17 RIU/RIU for TE polarization and 0.25 RIU/RIU for TM, confirming the correct functioning of the sensors when operating for each polarization separately. Future work will focus on simultaneous sensing with both polarizations and experiments with layered variation of refractive indices.