UK academic–industrial collaboration gets backing for silicon photonics

Collaboration funded

A consortium of five universities and two companies was awarded a £5 million grant by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to develop silicon photonics for the next generation of integrated circuits.

The group, led by Graham Reed and Goran Mashanovich, from the Advanced Technology Institute at Surrey University, includes researchers from St Andrews, Leeds, Warwick and Southampton universities with QinetiQ and Intel as industrial partners.

Silicon Photonics promises to revolutionise the next generation of integrated circuits by providing ways of making optical interconnections between chips and circuit boards, optical signal processing, optical sensing, and lab-on-a-chip biological applications.

It is also expected to provide low-cost optical signal processing chips that will interface with optical fibres brought directly to business premises or homes to apply Fibre To The Premise (FTTP) technology.

Services such as video-on-demand, high-speed Internet, high definition TV and Internet Protocol TV, that require large bandwidths, are likely to grow significantly as a result of this work.

Integrating both optical functionality and electrical intelligence into the same silicon chip is expected to deliver a cost advantage compared to more conventional optical technologies.

Reed said, “As a team we are committed to providing technology suitable for industrial take-up.”

Ravi Silva, director of the Advanced Technology Institute,  said, “This consortium of researchers has the potential to provide the next photonic superchip that will form the backbone to the next generation semiconductor industry.”