The silicon photonics demonstrator combines the strength of IMEC and LETI’s advanced photonics integration. IMEC’s active silicon photonics platform, blending high-quality active and passive components, is combined with backside evanescent coupling developed by LETI to enable heterogeneous integration or multi-level photonics circuits. It is the latter enablement that will be pursued through a photonic circuit to realize a vector matrix product that requires low-loss silicon crossings.

The photonic circuit* will be composed of three parts:
• an input stage where Mach-Zehnder modulators operating at high speed (10GHz or more) will convert the input data stream to the optical domain.
• a computing stage where the input optical waves will be mixed and weighted to form the results of the computation.
• an output stage with integrated photodetectors where the resulting optical waves are converted back to the electrical domain, ready for conversion to the digital domain.

The resulting operation will lead to vector-matrix products performing at 10GHz+ rates. *Photonic circuit is currently at the design stage.