(2013-2015) HERMES: High dEnsity Silicon GeRManium intEgrated photonicS

The first grant EPSRC funded project HERMES has been very successful in developing a range of materials and processes within the nanofabrication centre at Southampton. The output of the work has led to new material systems based on Silicon nitride (more info) and a Group IV based epitaxy techniques leading to the possibility to tune the silicon content within Silicon Germanium alloys (Publication 1, Publication 2).

The background processing knowledge and demonstrated capabilities on Germanium, silicon Germanium and silicon nitride gained during the HERMES project have been successfully applied to various projects. The best example is with the MIGRATION project where Germanium based waveguiding technology targeting mid infrared has been successfully developed using HERMES processing knowledge background  (Publication 1).

The work demonstrated in HERMES paved the way for industrially led funding funding in H2020 (COSMICC) and through EPSRC (Properity partnership) enabling further development of the possibilities offered by the demonstrated platforms.

For the work demonstrated on the tunable Silicon Germanium alloy,  Dr Callum Littlejohns won the award within the “Information Overload” category at the 2015 EPSRC ICT Pioneers Award. This work was also selected as a prestigious post-deadline paper at the IEEE Group IV Photonics conference in Paris, 2014 and protected by two separate patents.