Kavli Affiliate: Simon Groblacher
| First 5 Authors: Zizheng Li, Naresh Sharma, Bruno Lopez-Rodriguez, Roald van der Kolk, Thomas Scholte
| Summary:
In the past decade, lithium niobate (LiNbO3 or LN) photonics, thanks to its
heat-free and fast electro-optical modulation, second-order non-linearities and
low loss, has been extensively investigated. Despite numerous demonstrations of
high-performance LN photonics, processing lithium niobate remains challenging
and suffers from incompatibilities with standard complementary metal-oxide
semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication lines, limiting its scalability. Silicon
carbide (SiC) is an emerging material platform with a high refractive index, a
large non-linear Kerr coefficient, and a promising candidate for heterogeneous
integration with LN photonics. Current approaches of SiC/LN integration require
transfer-bonding techniques, which are time-consuming, expensive, and lack
precision in layer thickness. Here we show that amorphous silicon carbide
(a-SiC), deposited using inductively coupled plasma enhanced chemical vapor
deposition (ICPCVD) at low temperatures (< 165 C), can be conveniently
integrated with LiNbO3 and processed to form high-performance photonics. Most
importantly, the fabrication only involves a standard, silicon-compatible,
reactive ion etching step and leaves the LiNbO3 intact, hence its compatibility
with standard foundry processes. As a proof-of-principle, we fabricated
waveguides and ring resonators on the developed a-SiC/LN platform and achieved
intrinsic quality factors higher than 106,000 and resonance electro-optic
tunability of 3.4 pm/V with 3 mm tuning length. We showcase the possibility of
dense integration by fabricating and testing ring resonators with 40um radius
without a noticeable loss penalty. Our platform offers a CMOS-compatible and
scalable approach for implementation of future fast electro-optic modulators
and reconfigurable photonic circuits as well as nonlinear processes which can
benefit from involving both second and third-order nonlinearities.
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