As the integrated circuit industry enters the “post-Moore era,” the difficulty and cost of improving integrated circuit chip performance are increasing. There is an urgent need to find new technological solutions.
Currently, integrated optoelectronic technologies represented by silicon photonics and thin-film lithium niobate photonic technology are disruptive technologies to address this bottleneck. Among them, lithium niobate, known as “optical silicon,” has received widespread attention in recent years. Research institutions abroad, such as Harvard University, have even proposed plans to build a new generation of “lithium niobate valley” modeled after the “Silicon Valley”.
Recently, the research team at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has also made breakthrough progress in the field of heterogeneously integrated lithium tantalate wafers and high-performance photonic chips, successfully developing a new type of “optical silicon” chip that can be mass-produced.
Similar to lithium niobate, the research team and collaborators have demonstrated that single-crystal lithium tantalate thin films also possess excellent electro-optic conversion characteristics, and have advantages over lithium niobate in terms of birefringence, transparent window range, resistance to optical damage, and frequency comb generation. Furthermore, the preparation process of silicon-based lithium tantalate hetero-wafers (LTOI) is closer to that of silicon on insulator (SOI), allowing for low-cost and scalable manufacturing, which has extremely high application value.
The research team employed a heterogeneously integrated technology based on the “universal ion knife” to prepare high-quality silicon-based lithium tantalate single-crystal thin film hetero-wafers through hydrogen ion implantation combined with wafer bonding. At the same time, they jointly developed ultra-low loss lithium tantalate photonic device micro-nano processing methods with their collaborative team, successfully fabricating lithium tantalate photonic chips using wafer-level processing.
Lithium tantalate photonic chips not only exhibit electro-optic modulation efficiencies comparable to lithium niobate thin films, but the research team also successfully generated soliton optical frequency combs for the first time in an X-cut electro-optic platform based on lithium tantalate photonic chips. Combined with their electro-optic tunable properties, they are expected to find applications in laser radar, precision measurement, and more.
It is worth mentioning that the research team has currently tackled 8-inch wafer preparation technology, laying a core material foundation for the development of larger-scale domestic optoelectronic integrated chips and mobile terminal RF filter chips.
The extremely low optical loss, efficient electro-optic conversion, and soliton frequency comb generation characteristics exhibited by lithium tantalate photonic chips are expected to provide solutions to overcome the four major bottleneck issues of speed, power consumption, frequency, and bandwidth in the communication field, and to foster revolutionary technologies in low-temperature quantum, optical computing, and optical communication.
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