A wave of integration

Researchers in Japan have designed and fabricated a compact silicon wire array waveguide, which can minimise phase error associated with the wavelength division multiplexing necessary for all silicon photonics applications. Two features allowed the team to effect this: the efficient and simple design of the device, and the use of ArF immersion lithography to optimise the manufacturing process. This is a project undertaken by a number of institutions and corporations, with researchers contributing from Oki Electric Industry, AIST and NTT. The target of the project is advancing the technology for the LSI and photonics integrated systems to realise on-chip data centres. It began in 2010 and ends in March 2014.