The core technology behind Photon Bridge
A patented platform for heterogeneous photonics
At the heart of Photon Bridge is a patented cantilever waveguide technology purpose-built to bridge silicon photonics with any III–V material system.
This universal interface enables seamless integration of active III–V devices - such as lasers, amplifiers, and modulators - onto silicon photonic interposers without material-specific customization.
Concurrent optical & electrical bonding
Photon Bridge cantilever waveguides enable optical I/O bonding to be performed simultaneously with standard electrical I/O flip-chip bonding.
This unified assembly flow eliminates secondary optical attach steps, reducing complexity, cost, and variability while maintaining compatibility with high-volume semiconductor manufacturing processes.
Scalable, low-loss, high-yield integration
Angled facets with anti-reflection coatings minimize back reflections to below −40 dB, ensuring stable, high-performance, low loss (<1dB) optical links. The robustness and repeatability of the assembly process deliver high manufacturing yields, making the number of optical I/Os per chip effectively unlimited and enabling true scalability for next-generation photonic systems.
Passive alignment
Sub-200 nm precision
The cantilever structures support full passive alignment of optical I/Os, transforming typical placement accuracies of ~2 µm into effective alignments of better than 200 nm. This precision delivers a high performance butt-coupled optical interface between III–V devices and the silicon photonics interposer, without active alignment or tuning.
Thick-film silicon photonics: built for power, performance, and manufacturability
A fundamentally different waveguide platform
Photon Bridge is built on a thick-film silicon photonics platform using 2 µm waveguides, in contrast to conventional 220 nm thin-film silicon photonics.
This geometry fundamentally changes how light is guided, enabling a platform optimized not just for density, but for performance, robustness, and scalability.
Higher power handling and lower optical loss
The larger waveguide cross-section supports significantly higher optical powers without nonlinear effects or damage, while also reducing scattering and propagation loss. Compared to thin-film silicon photonics, the thick-film platform delivers approximately 10× lower loss and 10× higher optical power handling, making it well suited for demanding optical I/O and high-power integrated photonics applications.
Exceptional tolerance to manufacturing variations
Thick-film waveguides are inherently less sensitive to linewidth, thickness, and etch variations. This results in more predictable device performance and dramatically improved yield. We estimate the platform is 25× less sensitive to manufacturing variations than thin-film silicon photonics, enabling robust,