Veeco imec breakthrough opens door to barium titanate material platform

Veeco Instruments, a semiconductor process equipment manufacturer, and imec jointly developed a 300-mm high-volume-manufacturing-compatible process that enables the integration of barium titanate (BTO) on a silicon photonics platform. BTO, a material with electro-optical properties, can be used for high-speed and low-power light modulation in emerging applications such as high-speed optical transceivers, quantum computing, lidar, and AR/VR applications.

The Veeco 300-mm oxide system for hybrid-molecular beam epitaxy barium titanate-on-silicon epitaxy. Courtesy of Veeco Instruments.

As part of the collaboration, the companies developed a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE)- based cluster system. The platform is designed for the epitaxy of BTO single-crystalline thin films on silicon, available with both solid and hybrid MBE solutions. According to the partners, the solution will allow integration of BTO onto a 300-mm silicon platform, enabling the integration of electro-optical materials into silicon photonics.

Historically, approaches to integrate BTO have struggled to meet the desired cost targets to make it viable for high-volume manufacturing. Now, with the optical transceiver market for datacom expected to grow to $13.1 billion in 2030, up from $2.9 billion in 2024, efforts to alleviate the trade-offs of current silicon modulator technologies, including high power consumption, performance (speed, drive voltage), and area via the introduction of novel electro-optic materials into silicon photonics will be crucial, imec said, in a release. At present, there is no commercially available production-compatible solution for manufacturing these materials.

According to Clement Merckling, scientific director at imec, the development builds on four years of imec-Veeco collaboration targeting such a breakthrough.“With the introduction of Veeco’s first-of-its-kind MBE solution, we are expanding our capabilities for heterogeneous integration of beyond-[silicon] electro-optic materials, strengthening our R&D offering for current and new partners with an interest in exploring and prototyping next-generation silicon photonics technology,” said Joris Van Campenhout, imec fellow and optical I/O program director.

Matthew Marek, senior director of marketing for Veeco’s MBE product line, called the partnership and achievement a, “monumental step forward for the MBE industry, datacom, and quantum computing production. 

“The historic view of MBE processing has been that it is slow and expensive; however, new hardware developments that our team validated in partnership with imec bring MBE into a cost-effective domain that is suitable for semiconductor fabs,” Marek said.