Photonic Wire Bond Packaging for Silicon Photonic Optical Fibres and Laser Integration

(47:30 + Q&A) Prof. Lukas Chrostowski, University of British Columbia; co-founder of Dream Photonics Inc. -- optical connections, low insertion loss, cost effective, scalability, commercialization ...
Summary: Photonic integrated circuit technology (silicon photonics) is used for many applications including optical data communications, optical and quantum computing, and sensing including LiDAR, biomedical and environmental. A major packaging challenge facing the industry is optical coupling between multiple integrated photonic components together with low insertion loss, in a cost effective manner, into a package suitable for commercialization. A promising approach is to create “photonic wire bonds” (PWBs), namely optical waveguides that look similar to conventional electrical wire bonds. PWBs are a high-yield, low-insertion-loss, and high-throughput versatile method of packaging photonic components such as chip-to-fiber and laser-to-chip interconnects. Utilizing two-photon polymerization to fabricate freeform 3D polymer structures, PWBs can connect components with arbitrarily disparate mode field shapes and sizes. Capabilities and advantages of the PWB technique include: gain chip integration with existing ’known good die’, dense optical I/O connections to the chip, scalability from prototyping to high-volume, and interconnects that are not possible with other standard photonic packaging techniques.
Lukas Chrostowski is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, and co-founder of Dream Photonics Inc. Through his research in silicon photonics, optoelectronics, high-speed laser design, fabrication and test, for applications in optical communications, biophotonics, and quantum photonics, he has published more than 300 journal and conference publications. He co-authored the book “Silicon Photonics Design” (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Dr. Chrostowski was the co-director of the Advanced Materials and Process Engineering Laboratory (AMPEL) Nanofabrication Facility (ANF), 2008-2016. Dr. Chrostowski was the Program Director of the NSERC CREATE Silicon Electronic-Photonic Integrated Circuits (Si-EPIC) training program in Canada, and has been teaching numerous silicon photonics workshops and courses since 2008, which continue today as the SiEPICfab consortium. Chrostowski received the Killam Teaching Prize at the University of British Columbia in 2014, IEEE Photonics Society Technical Skills Educator Award in 2021, and IEEE Canada’s J.M Ham Outstanding Engineering Educator Award in 2021. He was an elected member of the IEEE Photonics Society 2014-2016 Board of Governors. He was elected to the college of the Royal Society of Canada in 2019. Chrostowski is the Program Director for the NSERC CREATE 2020-2026 Quantum Computing program (Quantum BC), co-leading the Quantum Silicon Photonics design-fabricate-test workshop.

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