On-chip light sources for silicon photonics

By Zhiping Zhou, B. Yin, Jürgen Michel. Light: Science & Applications, 2015

510 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Serving as the electrical to optical converter, the on-chip silicon light source is an indispensable component of silicon photonic technologies and has long been pursued. Here, we briefly review the history and recent progress of a few promising contenders for on-chip light sources in terms of operating wavelength, pump condition, power consumption, and fabrication process. Additionally, the performance of each contender is also assessed with respect to thermal stability, which is a crucial parameter to consider in complex optoelectronic integrated circuits (OEICs) and optical interconnections. Currently, III-V-based silicon (Si) lasers formed via bonding techniques demonstrate the best performance and display the best opportunity for commercial usage in the near future. However, in the long term, direct hetero-epitaxial growth of III–V materials on Si seems more promising for low-cost, high-yield fabrication. The demonstration of high-performance quantum dot (QD) lasers monolithically grown on Si strongly forecasts its feasibility and enormous potential for on-chip lasers. The superior temperature-insensitive characteristics of the QD laser promote this design in large-scale high-density OEICs. The Germanium (Ge)-on-Si laser is also competitive for large-scale monolithic integration in the future. Compared with a III-V-based Si laser, the biggest potential advantage of a Ge-on-Si laser lies in its material and processing compatibility with Si technology. Additionally, the versatility of Ge facilitates photon emission, modulation, and detection simultaneously with a simple process complexity and low cost. Hybrid silicon lasers based on bonded III–V layers on silicon are currently the best contenders for on-chip lasers for silicon photonics. On-chip silicon light sources are highly desired for use as electrical-to-optical converters in silicon-based photonics. Zhiping Zhou and Bing Yin of Peking University in China and Jurgen Michel of Massachusetts Institute of Technology assess the three main contenders for such light sources: erbium-based light sources, germanium-on-silicon lasers and III-V-based silicon lasers. They consider operating wavelength, pumping conditions, power consumption, thermal stability and fabrication process. The scientists regard the power efficiencies of electrically pumped erbium-based lasers as being too low and the threshold currents of germanium lasers as being too high. They conclude that III–V quantum dot lasers monolithically grown on silicon show the most promise for realizing on-chip lasers.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af8f93e28a69e51e1ea327e676b7a1da58119003

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Citations in the corpus

Metasurface holography: from fundamentals to applications (2018, background): “inear response [10–13]. Meanwhile, metasurfaces have shown the high potential of being easily integrated into multifunctional on-chip optoelectronic systems in both optical and radio frequency ranges [14, 15]. The emergence of the so-called flat optics with metasurfaces has yielded groundbreaking ph”
Silicon Photonic Biosensors Using Label-Free Detection (2018, background): “606 An alternative and more efficient way of integrating III/V gain materials on Si substrates is through 607 indirect (using metal or polymer layers) or direct bonding techniques [225,242], commonly referred to as 608 hybrid or heterogeneous integration.”