CEA-Leti Completes HELIOS Program for the Development of Silicon Photonics Devices

CEA-Leti has recently revealed it has successfully completed the HELIOS program and that Europe will now be fully equipped to design and manufacture silicon photonics.

Leti CEO Laurent Malier said, “It is strategically important for Europe to maintain photonic chip-design and chip-integrating functions to compete with other countries and to encourage innovation by European microelectronics companies.”

The European Commission launched this project, which includes an array of microelectronics fabrication processes, in order to develop a complete design and fabrication supply chain that integrates a photonic layer with a CMOS circuit. In fact, the HELIOS program was coordinated by Leti which is an institute of CEA, a French research and technology organization that caters to the energy, IT, healthcare, defense and security verticals.

The project team has demonstrated a complete design flow that incorporates both silicon photonics device design and electronic/photonic system design in an EDA-compatible framework. Silicon photonics is imperative for several applications like data communications and in developing optical telecommunications or optical interconnects in microelectronic circuits.

Moreover, it is cost-effective to integrate photonic and electronic functions on the same chip. And CMOS photonics can power low-cost solutions for various applications like in optical communications, optical interconnections between semiconductor chips and circuit boards, optical signal processing, optical sensing, and biological applications, said officials.

“HELIOS’s success in creating the essential building blocks for integrating photonics with CMOS circuits and making the process available to a variety of users underscores the key role that broad European technological cooperation plays in a very competitive global business environment,” Malier added.