Silicon photonics reliability and qualification standards

Due to explosive growth of internet traffic during past decades, there is an imminent need for scalable technologies that can enable both high-speed and low-power consumption requirements of today's optical networks. Silicon photonics (SiPh) has emerged as the best solution to address these challenges. SiPh-based products are solid state devices that are built via standard CMOS fabrication methods that convert between optical and electrical transmission states. These products need to be reliable for long-term use in datacenter and communication networks as well as for novel applications such as AI, sensing and edge computing. Passive SiPh components such as waveguides, couplers, polarization splitters/rotators and multiplexers/de-multiplexers have different qualification and reliability test methods and requirements versus active SiPh components such as integrated lasers, modulators, photodiodes, and thermal tuners. To better understand and predict the potential failure mechanism and the micro-optic lifetime of the various devices that are monolithically integrated into SiPh chips, there is a need for well-defined qualification and reliability protocols across the industry.