How Is Silicon-on-Insulator Technology Fueling Growth in Silicon Photonics?

Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate technology has been the defining foundation of silicon photonic integrated circuits for over 20 years, fostering their commercial deployment in the data center by promoting high-speed optical transceiver products.

Sharing Soitec’s perspective from the strategic crossroads between fabless PIC developers, foundries, and system-level integrators, Sciancalepore provides an in-depth overview of the market and technology trends driving silicon photonics applications today, including their recent expansion from data center interconnects into consumer sensing devices and all-optical computing technologies. His presentation further details the latest technological advancements in SOI substrate technology, including the benchmark of an extensive set of optical devices and circuits on silicon photonics multi-project wafer (MPW) runs, where an extensive set of optical devices and circuits are fabricated, with optical characterization data and device performance supporting the ultimate choice of SOI substrate technology for silicon photonics applications.

About the presenter
Corrado Sciancalepore, Ph.D., is technical marketing manager within the specialty-SOI business unit at Soitec. He received a M.Sc. degree in engineering physics from Politecnico di Torino in Italy in 2009, and a doctorate in optical and electrical engineering from the École Centrale de Lyon in France in 2012. From 2013 until 2020, he was with the CEA-Leti, based in Grenoble, France, as a permanent researcher of silicon photonics within the optics and photonics division. In 2020, he was hired by Soitec, which is based in Bernin, France. Sciancalepore is the author of more than 110 journal articles and international conference proceedings, leveraging senior experience in cutting-edge silicon photonic circuits, III-V optoelectronics, and VCSEL photonics.