Open Innovation Photonic ICs (OpenPICs)
The South Netherlands region is a leader in the field of photonics and is home to leading research facilities and an innovative photonics industry. With the OpenPICs project, the partners develop a strong industrial platform for PIC production and develop the open access tools to make the technology available to a broad range of companies. At present, the following technological challenges need to be overcome to make open access PIC technology suitable for a wide uptake:
- Design: Development of efficient sub-circuits (which are built up from a variety of basic building blocks) in order to reach a “first time right“ chip design.
- PDK: Improvement of the PDK which provides a designer with all the information about the measured and expected key figures of merit for each building block, enhancement of the software infrastructure for the PDK and acquisition of the necessary process data to fill the PDK.
- Production: Achieve higher level for the generic photonic integration process by means of the development of new building blocks, and the optimization and ultimately industrialization of the process of making photonic devices on a generic platform.
- Application: The progress in the above three factors determines the extent to which application developers are able to obtain quickly, reliably and cost-effectively the required functionality from chips which can also be produced in large volumes.
