Electronics + Photonics

The need for a next-generation computing platform becomes clear from IoT and 5G/6G and their high performance and low power requirements. Now, graphene and 2D materials (2DM) offer the unique ability to enable highly confined nonlinear interactions of light at low powers and at extremely low response times in the femtosecond range. However, it must be integrated with CMOS low-loss silicon nitride (SiN) platform that facilitates the possibility to create circuits for fast, low power, high bandwidth, general purpose computing and memory completely in the optical domain.

Graphene and 2D materials (2DM) have proven superior optoelectronic properties and performance in a plethora of applications with respect to conventional materials. Despite that, specific integration and processing challenges are impeding the industrial uptake of 2DM. In particular, the wafer-scale integration of high-quality and defect free 2DM layers, without disrupting the process-line Si foundries, has not been demonstrated.

The 2DNEURALVISION project aims to develop the enabling photonic and electronic integrated circuit components for a novel low-power consumption, any weather, any light computer vision system. These components are a 2DM enhanced wide-spectrum image sensor and optical neural  network with enabling 2DM components.