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

Abstract: 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.