The Semiconductor Institute has made a major breakthrough in the field of PZT optoelectronic materials and devices
Researcher Li Ming from the Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Researcher Qiu Feng from the Hangzhou Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Science and Technology of China, have collaborated to tackle the preparation and processing of wafer-level lead zirconate titanate thin film materials. They have achieved low-cost large-scale preparation of 4-inch wafer thin films using a combination of liquid deposition and magnetron sputtering (Figure 1), and have successfully developed the first publicly reported new lead zirconate titanate photonic integrated process development kit PDK library (Figure 2 and Table 1), achieving independent and controllable research and development of the entire process from material growth to device design and preparation, breaking through the bottlenecks of modulation bandwidth and energy efficiency constraints faced by traditional optical materials in the manufacture of high-speed electro-optic modulators. According to tests, the prepared Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator has a high-frequency modulation bandwidth greater than 70 GHz and a modulation efficiency of 1.3 V·cm; the microring modulator has a modulation bandwidth greater than 50 GHz and a modulation efficiency of 0·56 V·cm (Figure 3). Compared with traditional optical materials such as silicon and thin-film lithium niobate, the modulation efficiency is greatly improved while retaining a high modulation bandwidth. As shown in Table 1, the first version of the PDK device library also includes multi-mode interferometers, grating couplers, crossovers, etc. Through model design and process optimization iteration, the overall device performance and device library completeness still have huge room for improvement. This research achievement will help my country's next-generation new optical material platform and process technology localization research and development and industrial application, and provide important material platform support for the development of information photonic technologies such as optical communications and optical computing
