The latest research development of silicon based integrated optical waveguide amplifier

Abstract

In the process of informatization, the Moore’s Law is getting closer to the limit. Combining microelectronics and optoelectronics to develop silicon-based large-scale integrated optoelectronic technology has become the industry consensus. It is also the inevitable direction of technology development. In recent years, silicon photonics has made great progress, many key devices have reached the commercial standard, and some of the performance is even higher than the current commercial device performance. In silicon based optoelectronic integrated devices, silicon based light source is the most important but has not yet been completely resolved. Although silicon is an indirect band gap semiconductor material and luminous efficiency is very low, people have not given up efforts to prepare silicon based light source. Silicon based light sources include silicon based optical waveguide amplifiers, light emitting diodes, lasers, etc., of which silicon based optical waveguide amplifier is the basis for lasers and the indispensable device in a silicon based optoelectronic integrated circuit. If the optical waveguide amplifier has a high net gain, optically pumped lasers can be obtained by designing the appropriate resonant cavities at both ends of the optical waveguide amplifier. In this paper, we focus on silicon based optical waveguide amplifier, introducing the two main research directions of silicon based waveguide amplifier, silicon based hybrid integrated III-V semiconductor optical waveguide amplifier and silicon based rare earth ion doped optical waveguide amplifier. This paper discusses the principle, preparation method and development process of these two research directions in detail respectively, and lists relevant typical research results. And we briefly introduce other optical amplification technology. Finally, summary and prospect are given.