JePPIX launches pilot line PIC services

09 Dec 2020

Commercial indium phosphide wafer production now available at the Eindhoven facility, The Netherlands.

The JePPIX Pilot Line, based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has announced the launch of its design and manufacturing services for indium phosphide-based photonic integrated circuit production.

The pilot line offers commercial indium phosphide-based PIC production based on established Process Design Kits embedded in industry-standard design environments. JePPIX is open now for companies that need to prepare and sample their PICs ahead of commercial production.

JePPIX brings together the European InP and Triplex photonic integrated circuit (PIC) supply chain to advance and promote PIC technology.

The pilot line is designed to promote and facilitate an open-access, horizontal and generic foundry model to keeps pace with the international market, to bring in new client-users, enabling specialization, and facilitating the supply chain agility needed top support the emerging PIC markets.

The pilot line launch statement said, “The JePPIX Pilot Line provides a single point of contact for all the services needed for InP PIC product qualification, including: functional PIC modelling with manufacturing tolerances; design for test and manufacturing; and automated die testing with customizable scripting and test services.”

Muliple advantages

Indium phosphide PICs are said to offer a range of benefits because they are relatively small in size, low weight, and have low power consumption. Moreover, the possibility of integrating lasers, detectors, interferometers, photodetectors, modulators, filters, waveguides and other electro-optical technologies all on a single chip positively impacts the material resources needed, circuit level reproducibility and the overall costs.

PICs offer certain advantages over traditional approaches for implementing optical functionalities in various applications. They provide the engines for high performance metrology, quantum technology, sciences, agriculture and food, environmental monitoring, defence and security, among others.

JePPIX foundries offer robust and reproducible fabrication of customized PICs cut into dies. Fabrication is done via dedicated wafer runs for design iteration and advanced prototyping, and for low volume commercial production. Foundries offer flexible scheduling and predictable throughput times for the creation of custom PICs.

To accelerate the use of InP PICs, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme has supported the pilot line through the InPulse project, which has received funding under grant agreement No 871345. The following video explains the principles behind JePPIX: