SAPPHIRE: A Generic Foundry Platform for Silicon Photonics

A Shared Access Platform to Photonic Integrated Resources (SAPPHIRE) is presented, which aims to become the first national infrastructure enabling a shared access of different users to a generic silicon photonic foundry. The platform is based on the concept of high-level circuit design for photonic integrated circuits (PICs), where complex architectures can be designed without a specific knowledge of either electromagnetic (EM) or technological issues, but simply operating at the circuit level on a selected set of elementary functional elements, named building blocks (BBs). The main roles of the SAPPHIRE platform in the foundry-Users interactions are discussed, as well as the concept of photonic BBs and circuit simulation. Results on a proof-of-concept device are shown to demonstrate the validity of the high-level circuit design for PICs.