A High-Power, High-Efficiency Hybrid Silicon-Based Erbium Silicate-Silicon Nitride Waveguide Laser

Abstract

Silicon-based lasers have played an important role in silicon-based optoelectronic integrated system. Recent studies demonstrated erbium silicate was an ideal candidate material for high performance silicon-based lasers in the telecom wavelength due to its high erbium concentrations. In previous works erbium silicate compounds led to high waveguide losses, the hybrid layers of erbium silicate and silicon nitride seem to be suitable to overcome high losses of previous designs with Er-based gain media waveguides. So a hybrid erbium silicate-silicon nitride waveguide laser has been proposed to make up for the loss problems of erbium silicate material, and to obtain high laser output power and high efficiency. Then, different cavity geometries, including ordinary strip-loaded DFB cavity with pump/signal resonant external cavity, have been discussed and optimized to further improve the laser performance. A 70 mW high-power laser with the maximum power conversion efficiency of 60% can be obtained in a 6.5 mm distributed feedback cavity length through developing the optimized signal external resonator cavity and grating reflector. Finally, the usability of this technology has been discussed as a potential input laser for silicon photonics. The results indicate the hybrid erbium silicate-silicon nitride waveguide lasers with high performance as potential candidates for future scale integrated silicon-based lasers application.