- Working with light instead of electrons, PICs will play a key role in tomorrow’s infrastructure for communication, biosensing and transportation
- LIGENTEC has implemented its proprietary, patented, low-loss silicon nitride process technology within X-FAB’s existing high-throughput foundry workflow
LIGENTEC and X-FAB Silicon Foundries have announced a strategic partnership resulting in the large-scale supply of integrated photonic devices (PICs). Working with light instead of electrons, PICs will play a key role in tomorrow’s infrastructure for communication, biosensing and transportation.
Michael Zervas, co-founder of LIGENTEC said, “Silicon nitride offers superior performance to manage the light in the chip circuitry, with unprecedented low propagation losses and high-power handling. While there is growing worldwide demand for silicon nitride PICs, the missing piece is a commercial volume foundry that can keep pace with the expected uptake.”
LIGENTEC has implemented its proprietary, patented, low-loss silicon nitride process technology within X-FAB’s existing high-throughput foundry workflow. It means that LIGENTEC PICs are now commercially available in high volumes out of Europe. It is a key requisite enabling the secure and independent supply of the quantities foreseen in relation to sensors for self-driving cars, environment monitoring, quantum computers and an array of other applications.
LIGENTEC’s Director Thomas Hessler added, “This partnership allows us to offer the benefits of our technology to high volume customers. X-FAB’s advanced equipment and superior process control will enable us to serve the mass market with elevated performance PICs. Its multiple sites and capacity to deal with 100,000 new 200 mm wafer starts per month gives exceptional supply assurance and almost limitless scope for scaling. The proven track record X-FAB has in the automotive and medical sectors will open up new opportunities for LIGENTEC.”
