Advanced Photonic Integrated Circuits (Photonics Partnership) (RIA)

Evolving photonic integration is opening up a wealth of opportunities in many application areas by enhancing functionality and spectral coverage, facilitating new applications in biomedical, environmental and industrial fields, making devices more power-efficient and bringing ground-breaking technologies within reach of entrepreneurial SMEs.

The increasingly sophisticated requirements need new paradigms, capable of extending the functionalities of optical components through design, integration, fabrication, assembly and packaging techniques including the co-integration of photonic and electronic components. These need to be augmented with new functions and performance enhancements, requiring in many cases the development of new materials and innovative device structures.

Challenges are for example in mastering epitaxial material growth and processing on large wafers with improved quality, uniformity and very low defect densities, broadband (“white”) light sources and high sensitivity photodetectors (including arrays) and high-efficiency semiconductor lasers across many wavelength bands, capable of withstanding high temperatures (>85°C) depending on the intended application. Incorporation of new building blocks such as magneto-optic elements for non-reciprocal functionality (e.g. optical isolation) could also be included.

Proposals should demonstrate the developed integration technologies in at least two application oriented use cases and establish integration platforms, which help potential user companies with their uptake.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership for Photonics.