Aluminum plasmonic waveguides co-integrated with Si3N4 photonics using CMOS processes

Co-integrating CMOS plasmonics and photonics became the "sweet spot" to hit in order to combine their benefits and allow for volume manufacturing of plasmo-photonic integrated circuits. Plasmonics can naturally interface photonics with electronics while offering strong mode confinement, enabling in this way on-chip data interconnects when tailored to single-mode waveguides, as well as high-sensitivity biosensors when exposing Surface-Plasmon-Polariton (SPP) modes in aqueous environment. Their synergy with low-loss photonics can tolerate the high plasmonic propagation losses in interconnect applications, offering at the same time a powerful portfolio of passive photonic functions towards avoiding the use of bulk optics for SPP excitation and facilitating compact biosensor setups. The co-integration roadmap has to proceed, however, over the utilization of fully CMOS compatible material platforms and manufacturing processes in order to allow for a practical deployment route. Herein, we demonstrate for the first time Aluminum plasmonic waveguides co-integrated with Si3N4 photonics using CMOS manufacturing processes. We validate the data carrying credentials of CMOS plasmonics with 25 Gb/s data traffic and we confirm successful plasmonic propagation in both air and water-cladded waveguide configurations. This platform can potentially fuel the deployment of co-integrated plasmonic and photonic structures using CMOS processes for biosensing and on-chip interconnect applications.