Hybrid III-V-on-Silicon Microring Lasers

Abstract

ABSTRACTHybrid silicon laser is a promising solution to enable high-performance light source on large-scale, silicon-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs). As a compact laser cavity design, hybrid microring lasers are attractive for their intrinsic advantages of small footprint, low power consumption and flexibility in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), etc. Here we review recent progress in unidirectional microring lasers and device thermal management. Unidirectional emission is achieved by integrating a passive reflector that feeds laser emission back into laser cavity to introduce extra unidirectional gain. Up to 4X of device heating reduction is simulated by adding a metal thermal shunt to the laser to “short” heat to the silicon substrate through buried oxide layer (BOX) in the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrate. Obvious device heating reduction is also observed in experiment.