Abstract
Abstract Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have enabled numerous high performance, energy efficient, and compact technologies for optical communications, sensing, and metrology. One of the biggest challenges in scaling PICs comes from the parasitic reflections that feed light back into the laser source. These reflections increase noise and may cause laser destabilization. To avoid parasitic reflections, expensive and bulky optical isolators have been placed between the laser and the rest of the PIC leading to large increases in device footprint for on-chip integration schemes and significant increases in packaging complexity and cost for lasers co-packaged with passive PICs. This review article reports new findings on epitaxial quantum dot lasers on silicon and studies both theoretically and experimentally the connection between the material properties and the ultra-low reflection sensitivity that is achieved. Our results show that such quantum dot lasers on silicon exhibit much lower linewidth enhancement factors than any quantum well lasers. Together with the large damping factor, we show that the quantum dot gain medium is fundamentally dependent on dot uniformity, but through careful optimization, even epitaxial lasers on silicon can operate without an optical isolator, which is of paramount importance for the future high-speed silicon photonic systems.
Highlights
Silicon photonics is considered a mainstream data-transmission solution for next-generation data centers, compact technologies for high bandwidth density interconnects, high-performance computers, and many emerging applications such as sensors, and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) systems for self-driving vehicles [1, 2, 3]
Expensive and bulky optical isolators have been placed between the laser and the rest of the Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) leading to large increases in device footprint for on-chip integration schemes and significant increases in packaging complexity and cost for lasers co-packaged with passive PICs
We experimentally compare the optical feedback dynamics between an InAs/GaAs quantum dot (QD) FP laser directly grown onto silicon and a hybrid quantum well (QW) laser heterogeneously bonded on silicon
Summary
Silicon photonics is considered a mainstream data-transmission solution for next-generation data centers, compact technologies for high bandwidth density interconnects, high-performance computers, and many emerging applications such as sensors, and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) systems for self-driving vehicles [1, 2, 3]. Under EOF, it was proved that QD lasers emitting on the sole ground state (GS) transition are by essence much more stable; whereas, those operating on the excited state (ES) or within the dual-state lasing regime (GS + ES) output various complex chaotic dynamical states [37, 38] Together, these features strongly contribute to make QD lasers meaningful for many applications including but not limited to isolator-free integrated technologies [4], neuromorphic photonic based systems, optical radars, and high-speed random bit generators [29, 39, 40]. This work provides novel insights for designing high performance reflection insensitive semiconductor lasers, withstanding feedback rates much above the requirements dictated by the IEEE 802.3 These results clearly raise the possibility to integrate epitaxial QD lasers and other optical components without need of an optical isolator
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