PRESENTATION

Improving optical coupling in PIC and Hybrid Photonic Packaging with Aligned Two-Photon Lithography

Silicon Photonic has become an enabling technology for many different areas allowing miniaturized sensors, fast optical chips (instead of electrical) and improved performance in general. A wide rang of applications such as LIDAR, Telecom Transceiver, Data Center Switches, Quantum and Optical Computing, Medical Sensors ,etc. are already using Silicon Photonics (SiP)in the form of Photonics Integrated Circuits (PIC). They are though mostly still at low to medium volume as SiP requires an additional laser chipset to be included in the PIC. This means often time consuming active alignment of laser, micro optics and fibers to the PIC or complex micro optical set ups. The packaging of the PIC is still not at the same level as for electronics. We will present in this talk Aligned 2 Photon Lithography (A2PL), a new 3D printing process based on two photon polymerization, to reduce alignment tolerances, enabling passive pick and place and bringing freeform optics to the PIC community. The latter allows to reduce coupling losses or enables even higher miniaturization. We will show examples for printing on fibers for coupling to or from different Mode Field Diameters (MFD) and High Precision Printing of Free Space Micro Optics (FSMO) on the edge of chips. Two principles of high precision alignment are used and will be explained. They enable alignment with a precision down to 100nm.