*STAR Institute of Microelectronics (IME) and the University of Washington, in Seattle, will join forces to provide shared silicon photonics processes as part of the Optoelectronics Systems Integration in Silicon program (OpSIS). The collaboration is expected to help the R&D community significantly reduce the fabrication cost of silicon photonics integrated circuits. Hosted in University of Washington’s Institute for Photonic Integration, OpSIS is a new foundry service to facilitate R&D in silicon photonics technology. Under this partnership, IME will provide its in-house silicon photonics platform technology together with its fabrication and integration expertise in multi-GHz photonic devices. Such devices include integrated optical modulators and photodetectors, edge couplers, waveguides, array waveguide gratings, bends, couplers, ring resonators, splitters, multimode interferometers, add/drop filters, crossing and rotators. In return, the OpSIS team at University of Washington will contribute to IME’s extensive silicon photonics device library, a series of very high bandwidth devices, including photodetectors and modulators at speeds in excess of 20 GHz. The silicon photonics integrated circuits to be created under this program will be made available to the photonics research community worldwide and, in the process, facilitate technological advancements and proliferate creative ideas for the development of the next-generation devices. As the platform will be offered through multiproject wafer runs, which allow users from multiple projects to share the costs of a single fabrication run, research costs are lowered significantly for individual projects. “As silicon photonics goes beyond R&D to become mainstream technology, IME is excited and well-positioned to enable the photonics research community to take this technology to the next level to fulfill its vast potential in every area requiring high speed interconnects,” said Dim-Lee Kwong, the executive director of IME. “We would like the photonics industry 10 years from now to function in a way that's very similar to the electronics industry today. OpSIS’ shuttle runs will aid that development by reducing R&D costs by more than 100 times for an individual research team taking part,” says Michael Hochberg, director of the Institute for Photonic Integration and assistant professor of electrical engineering at the university. For more information, visit: www.ime.a-star.edu.sg