Veeco Instruments and Imec have jointly developed a 300mm fab-compatible process for integrating barium titanate (BTO) on silicon photonics platforms. The technique uses molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) at wafer scale to enable fast, low-power light modulation in applications such as datacom, quantum computing and lidar.
BTO has electro-optical properties that silicon lacks, enabling high-speed modulation at lower voltages. Until now, however, the material has proven difficult to scale and too costly for high-volume production. The new 300mm-compatible process developed by Veeco and Imec overcomes these hurdles by enabling epitaxial growth of high-quality BTO films directly on silicon wafers. This paves the way for CMOS-compatible production of next-generation photonic devices that remove limitations of current silicon-based modulators.
