Ramping production capacity of low-loss lithium niobate on insulator PICs for electro-optic and nonlinear applications

Lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) is one of the most promising emerging platforms for photonics integrated circuits (PICs) that comprises a unique set of interesting optical properties such as: a high electro-optic coefficient, high intrinsic 2nd and 3rd order nonlinearities, and a large transparency window (350nm - 5500nm). Recent advancements in bonding of single crystal thin films of lithium niobate onto silicon substrates (LNOI), has opens a new avenue to explore the advantages of lithium niobate in the context of PICs and to benefit from their miniaturization, cost reduction, scalable manufacturing, and integration. This ultimately enables designing complex PICs with tens of components in a millimeters-size chip benefiting a wide range of applications including quantum technologies, telecom, LiDAR and sensing. However, so far, LNOI technology has been limited to few academic groups around the world. This is mainly because currently there are no PIC foundry that offers LNOI technology as standard platform to the industry. Establishing a reliable, high yield fabrication process for LNOI PICs is the key to ensure wide spread of this novel technology. CSEM is set to establish an open PIC foundry based on LNOI platform based on a well-tested process design kit (PDK) library. Here, we present our first results toward this goal and demonstrate a high-yield 150mm wafer scale fabrication technology for low-loss LNOI waveguides at two wavelengths: 1550nm and 780nm that demonstrate losses <0.2dB/cm. We also present our first experimental results on f-2f laser stabilization using LNOI waveguides and initial results on few PDK components such as low-V modulators.