Porous silicon technology, a breakthrough for silicon photonics: From packaging to monolithic integration

Low cost concept based on the porous silicon technology is shown to be well suitable for integrating monolithically the photonic devices on a standard silicon wafers by using localized SOI structures fabricated by electrochemical anodization of silicon wafers followed by thermal oxidation of porous silicon. The new approach consists in realizing buried localized porous oxidized silicon by exploiting two different routes: n^- epi/n⁺/n^- structures on p-type wafers and ion-implantation on standard CMOS/BiCMOS wafers. The peculiarities of the developed approach, including anodization and thermal oxidation regimes to form oxidized porous silicon regions with the required properties are presented. The advantages of the proposed approach in realizing the fiber-to-chip and power-over-fiber coupling are discussed.