Aurrion wins $13.9 million contract to advance electronic-photonic integration

GOLETA, USA: Aurrion Inc., a world leader in silicon photonics, announced that is has been awarded a $13.9 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) multi-year R&D contract through the Electronic-Photonic Heterogeneous Integration (E-PHI) program.

Working in collaboration with the University of California at Santa Barbara, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, the University of Washington and Rockwell Collins, Inc., Aurrion will develop new technologies and architectures for electronic-photonic integrated circuits on a common silicon substrate.

Dr. Greg Fish, Aurrion’s VP of Research and the Principal Investigator, explained that the components developed in this program will not only meet the performance of native substrate devices but exceed them, leading to a dramatic enhancement in systems.

“E-PHI is enabling key More-than-Moore technologies. The key innovation is leveraging both CMOS and MEMS silicon processes to produce 3D heterogeneous electronic/photonic silicon circuits that use diverse materials for photonic components yet are still processed and interconnected at wafer scale,” Dr. Fish said.

Using established foundry infrastructure, the technologies developed in this program are expected to dramatically improve both the performance and cost of complex photonic systems in multiple markets such as optical sensors, next generation transceivers and high performance computing.

“By combining the best photonic materials for the required functions closely integrated with electronics, we will demonstrate 3D chip scale systems that can achieve optical bench performance on a single silicon substrate,” Dr. Fish said.