Sandia's Radiation-Tolerant Silicon and InP Photonics Platforms with Multi-Project Wafer Runs

Radiation-tolerant photonic integrated circuits have the potential to revolutionize communication, sensing, and computing for space and terrestrial systems, offering improvements in isolation, size, weight, power and performance, as well as entirely new functionalities. Sandias National Security Photonics Center has developed integrated photonics platforms in silicon, GaAs, InP, and antimonide superlattices detectors. These platforms integrate lasers, amplifiers, modulators, detectors, switches, filters, multiplexers, waveguides, and other passives. We create compact microsystems with complex photonic functions both monolithically and through heterogeneous integration of silicon and III-V photonics, CMOS, and other electro-optic materials. We have characterized these photonics platforms in radiation environments with both high-energy microbeams as narrow as 1 micron at Sandias Ion Beam Laboratory and flood sources. Leveraging these capabilities, we interrogate with radiation individual elements of operating integrated photonics circuits and smaller substructures of those components and have developed new understanding of radiation effects in our photonics microsystems. Consequently, our modeling, design, and testing capability, informed by our radiation characterization results, allows us to substantially shorten the development cycle for radiation tolerant photonics. In addition, Sandia runs collaborative multi-project wafers in Silicon Photonics, InP Photonics and Silicon Read-out Integrated circuits ROICs that incorporate this learning. We will also describe Sandias custom photonic solutions for other harsh environments.