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Silicon to Software partner for innovation companies, Synopsis, has announced the completion of the PLASMOfab, a research project funded by the EU innovation program Horizon 2020. Launched in 2016, it will enable mass manufacturing of high-performance plasmo-photonic components. The project has brought together leading industrial partners and top-ranked academic and research institutes in the photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and opto-electronics value chain, including PhoeniX Software, now part of Synopsys' Photonic Solutions.

The three-year research project has significantly advanced the state of the art in PICs and CMOS-compatible plasmonics for optical data communications and bio-sensing for point-of-care applications. PLASMOfab has developed CMOS-compatible plasmonics to consolidate advanced PICs with electronic ICs in volume manufacturing. The project focused on CMOS-compatible metals and photonic structures that are harmonically co-integrated with electronics using standardized CMOS processes. As part of project validation, the PIC platform was used along with advanced peripherals to develop predominant functional modules with unprecedented performance.

A key achievement was the development of a groundbreaking ultra-compact plasmonic transmitter, which has a footprint of 90 x 5.5 µm² to transmit 0.8 TBit/s (800Gbit/s) through 4 individual 0.2 TBit/s transmitters. The project also demonstrated CMOS-compatible plasmonic waveguides with the lowest possible losses, as described in Nature's Scientific Reports. According to Nikos Pleros, Assistant Professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (the lead project coordinator institute), PLASMOfab's main goal has been to address the ever increasing needs for low energy, small size, high complexity and high performance mass manufactured PICs and it was achieved by developing a revolutionary yet CMOS-compatible fabrication platform for seamless co-integration of active plasmonics with photonic and electronic components.

As a result of the PLASMOfab research, two new companies have been launched to commercialize the new technologies:

• bialoom Ltd: will further explore plasmo-photonic biosensors in multichannel and high-sensitivity point-of-care diagnostics by combining plasmonic sensors with integrated Si3N4 photonic functionalities, electrical controls, biofunctionalization techniques, and microfluidics.
• Polariton Technologies Ltd: specializes in new photonic and electronic technologies for the testing, sensing, and telecommunications market. Their energy efficient and low-footprint plasmonic modulator will convert microwave signals to optical signals.

Dr. Dimitris Tsiokos, the Principal Researcher at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, expects that further development of CMOS-compatible plasmonic components with CMOS fabrication processes and photonics technologies will demonstrate plasmonics' clear advantages in PICs. According to him, when the best of all three worlds of plasmonics, photonics, and electronics converge in a single integration platform, PICs with unprecedented performance and functionality will be realized, targeting a diverse set of applications and industrial needs while meeting mass production requirements.