Plate Nº 14 · recorded October 10, 2026
PhysicsReported finding
MIT Makes Flexible, Transparent Silicon Photonics Chips at Wafer Scale
MIT and NY Creates researchers made 300-mm silicon-photonics wafers that are both flexible and transparent, producing chips that survived thousands of bends with no performance loss.
By Elena Vasquez4 min read726 words
In brief
- MIT researchers produced flexible, transparent silicon-photonics chips on standard 300-millimeter wafers.
- A chip survived thousands of bends around a small-screw-sized cylinder with no performance drop.
- The finished wafer is only a few microns thick — less than a tenth of a human hair.
- The paper appears in the journal Optica; lead author is MIT graduate student Tal Sneh.
- Process temperatures stayed at or below 500 degrees Celsius to manage wafer stress.
MIT researchers have built silicon-photonics wafers that are both flexible and transparent — and they did it on standard 300-millimeter semiconductor manufacturing lines, a first for a field whose chips have always been rigid and opaque. Chips made this way survived being bent thousands of times around a cylinder the width of a small screw with no drop in performance.
The paper, published in the journal Optica, describes a fabrication platform developed in collaboration with engineers at NY Creates at the Albany NanoTech Complex in New York. Lead author Tal Sneh and Andres Garcia Coleto, both EECS graduate students, worked with Thomas Dyer and Kevin Fealey of NY Creates and Milica Notaros PhD '23. Senior author Jelena Notaros is the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
What problem does this solve?
Silicon photonics uses light instead of electricity to transmit and process data on chips. Over the past decade, foundries have learned to produce 300-millimeter wafers carrying billions of nanoscale optical devices. The catch: those chips are stiff and block light.
Scientists have demonstrated flexible or transparent chips in the lab before, but only a handful of devices at a time — far too few for real products. "We realized that there are a lot of applications that would benefit from having a chip that is flexible and transparent," Notaros said.
How does the process work?
The team starts with a conventional rigid silicon wafer and patterns tiny optical wires called waveguides onto it. Then comes the tricky part:
- They bond a temporary silicon wafer on top for support.
- They flip the stack over and strip away the entire original silicon substrate.
- What remains is a flat layer of material thinner than a tenth of a human hair.
- They glue a thin, transparent polyester film to it and remove the temporary wafer.
The result is a wafer only a few microns thick that still carries the oxide and waveguide layers needed to guide light. "Thanks to the fact that we added that rigid temporary support before we flipped the wafer over, we can go all the way down so we are just left with the oxide and waveguiding layers," Sneh explained.
The hardest step was removing nearly all the material from a 300-millimeter wafer without destroying the ultrathin layers left behind. Stress can make such wafers bow; if the strain isn't managed, "it is going to get ripples across its surface or even shatter in the fabrication line," Dyer said. The researchers solved this by keeping process temperatures at or below 500 degrees Celsius, thinning the silicon with industrial methods, and finishing with a precise selective chemical etch.
How well do the chips perform?
Three experiments tested the platform:
- Waveguiding. Chips with waveguides of different lengths confirmed the optical performance held up.
- Flexibility. A chip bent thousands of times around cylinders of various diameters showed no degradation — down to a small-screw-sized cylinder. It only began to degrade after being bent around a toothpick several times.
- Transparency. Placed in front of a bionic eye, the chip caused only minimal haze and no noticeable image distortion.
"This experiment validated that the platform can be used for our proposed applications, performing even well beyond the metrics required for these intended systems," Garcia Coleto said.
What could these chips enable?
The team points to applications such as discreet health monitors that conform to the body and curved augmented-reality displays — for example, a display fitted to a pilot's visor or a heads-up windshield that could replace the heavy bulk-optical systems pilots currently rely on for real-time safety information.
The results are promising but preliminary in some respects: the chips tested so far carry relatively simple components. The researchers say they next want to add more complex functionality and further improve waveguide efficiency and transparency.
Notaros hopes the platform, built on established foundry tools, will reach the wider research community. "There's the potential for us to make the platform accessible to other groups within our research community and open these new application areas to the field of silicon photonics as a whole," she said.
The research received funding from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and a MathWorks Fellowship. Wafer processing took place at NY Creates; chip dicing was done at MIT.nano.
via opg.optica.org (Original)
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