Photoluminescent colour centres on a mainstream silicon photonic foundry platform

Abstract

The fabrication of silicon photonic components in commercial CMOS-compatible foundries has revolutionized the impact of silicon photonics on advancing communication, quantum computing and artificial intelligence, due to their benefits of mass production, high throughput, low cost, and high performance. The indirect bandgap of silicon introduces a fundamental challenge; thus, the mainstream silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform does not have efficient light sources. Recently, luminescent colour centres in SOI have emerged as one promising approach for developing efficient on-chip classical and quantum light sources, although past work has relied on custom fabrication that is not foundry-compatible. In this work, we demonstrate W-centre photoluminescence on a mainstream silicon photonics platform through development of a straightforward back end-of-line (BEOL) treatment. At an optimal implant energy of 7~MeV, we observed W-centre photoluminescence with a brightness comparable to prior in-house processes. We performed a series of experiments on Circular Bragg Grating (CBG) devices with varying pitches, duty cycles, and implant energies to confirm the PL emission from the encapsulated SOI device layer rather than the handle wafer. Our novel approach in fabricating silicon colour centres in commercial silicon photonic foundry processes opens up new opportunities for integrating classical and quantum light sources directly onto silicon photonic circuits, unlocking opportunities for large-scale integration of advanced photonic architectures on chip.