Towards the Photonic Integration of Titanium Dioxide-on-Silicon for Datacom and Telecom Application

Photonics have been identified as a solution to meet the growing demand of huge data traffic due to its high bandwidth and fast signal processing ability. Most current photonic materials including Silicon, Silica, Silicon Nitride, III-V semiconductors etc. suffer from a variety of limiting factors. Nearly all of these material platforms address 1.5 µm telecom band exclusively, and neglect wavelengths around 1300 nm as well as interconnect band around 800 to 900 nm. Therefore, we present Titanium Dioxide - TiO2 as a novel photonic material for broadband operation for low cost and low power consumption optical data center and telecom networks. Design of photonic integrated circuit building blocks, such as single mode polarization independent waveguide and grating coupler based on TiO2 material, is presented. The novel photonic integrated circuits enable novel disaggregate and scalable optical data center architectures as well as dynamic metro access switching nodes with edge computing functionalities; and TiO2 can be the promising candidate in this field.