Stitch-Free, Diamond-Scribed Silicon Nitride Photonic Integrated Circuits for the Visible Band
Silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits for the visible band are conventionally built with a buried oxide overcladding and singulated with wafer-scale tooling, constraints that preclude evanescent access to the guided mode for externally integrated emitters. We report a PECVD grown $Si_3N_4$ platform designed around an air-clad waveguide whose evanescent field remains accessible along the full device length. Two process elements make this geometry practical at chip scale. Fixed-beam moving-stage electron-beam lithography writes 500 nm single-mode waveguides as one continuous exposure across the 5 mm chip, removing write-field stitching which, given the $σ^{2}/d^{4}$ scaling of sidewall scattering in this high-confinement geometry at 635 nm, would otherwise dominate the loss budget. Chip singulation is performed by pen-type diamond scribing along lithographically patterned markers registered to in-plane direction, cleaving the Si(100) substrate to yield end-facets within $2^\circ$ of normal at $80 \%$ yield. Structural characterization by scanning electron microscopy confirms stitch-free waveguide geometry and undamaged, near-vertical scribed facets; light is coupled end-fire into fabricated devices and guided to a microring with evanescent bus-to-ring coupling confirmed by scattering imaging, and a sidewall-roughness-dependent scattering-loss model indicates that loss remains low in the roughness regime consistent with the observed facet and sidewall quality. Building on the intrinsic emitter-resonator coupling demonstrated in, this platform extends monolithic $Si_3N_4$ photonics toward scalable visible-to-near-infrared quantum and classical circuits.