A Wafer-Scale Heterogeneous III-V-on-Silicon Nitride Quantum Photonic Platform

TL;DR

This paper presents a wafer-scale heterogeneous quantum photonic platform integrating III-V materials with silicon nitride circuits, enabling scalable, high-performance quantum light sources, nonlinear devices, and detectors.

Contribution

It demonstrates a novel wafer-scale integration of III-V and silicon nitride photonics with ultra-low loss and high quality factors, advancing scalable quantum photonic systems.

Findings

Achieved <1 dB/m loss in SiN waveguides and resonators with Q > 10^6.

Realized 15× brighter entanglement sources and efficient nonlinear conversion.

Integrated high-efficiency lasers and photodetectors with up to 99% quantum efficiency.

Abstract

Heterogeneous integration of gain and strongly nonlinear materials with ultra-low-loss silicon nitride (SiN) photonics offers a route to scalable quantum circuits, but concurrent wafer-scale manufacturability, low interlayer loss, and high performance have been challenging to realize. Here we demonstrate a wafer-scale III-V-on-SiN quantum photonic platform that directly integrates III-V layers to foundry-fabricated SiN circuits. The SiN layer provides 200-300 nm thick waveguides with $<1$ dB/m loss and a mature passive photonics ecosystem, while III-V materials provide large $\chi^{\left(2\right)}$ and $\chi^{\left(3\right)}$ nonlinearities for parametric gain, frequency conversion and quantum light generation. Adiabatic interlayer couplers yield $<25$ mdB loss to InGaP waveguides and resonators with intrinsic quality factors exceeding $10^6$, enabling $15\times$ brighter entanglement sources and efficient nonlinear conversion on SiN. Integrated components--including low-loss beam splitters, waveguide crossers, and tunable interferometers--are complemented by III-V lasers and InP photodetectors with amplifiers achieving up to $99^{+1}_{-12}\%$ quantum efficiency and $3$ GHz bandwidth. This architecture unites ultra-efficient sources, nonlinear elements and detectors on a wafer-scale, low-loss platform, establishing a path toward large-scale, low-noise quantum photonic systems.