Photoluminescent Color Centers on a Mainstream Silicon Photonic Foundry Platform

ABSTRACT Silicon photonic integrated circuits fabricated on commercial CMOS‐compatible foundries have propelled major advances in data center communication, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence due to their scalability, mass production, low cost, and high performance. However, the indirect bandgap of silicon prevents the realization of efficient silicon light sources on these mainstream silicon‐on‐insulator (SOI) platforms. Luminescent color centers in silicon have emerged as a promising approach to fabricate monolithic light sources from the same foundry SOI. Despite the potential, all prior work relies heavily on custom, non‐foundry‐compatible fabrication and Front‐End‐Of‐Line (FEOL) processes, due to challenges in creating color centers in commercial CMOS‐compatible foundries. In this work, we demonstrate W‐center photoluminescence (PL) from chips fabricated on the mainstream silicon photonics actives platform using a straightforward back‐end‐of‐line (BEOL) recipe. At a 7.0 MeV implant energy, we achieved W‐center photoluminescence with brightness comparable to prior in‐house processes. Furthermore, our experimental investigations confirm that the PL emission originates from the encapsulated SOI device layer and the electrical functionality is preserved, thereby validating process compatibility with active foundry components. This approach enables the integration of classical and quantum light sources directly onto fabricated silicon photonic circuits, paving the way for scalable, advanced photonic architectures on chip.