A doctoral student has developed an on-silicon laser, including testing and evaluating prototypes. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lpor.202100348
This has major potential in telecom at least; with only minor added steps, these opto-electrics were produced using current silicon lithographic processes.
Here, we demonstrate optical gain and lasing in a hybrid-integrated rare-earth silicon microdisk. The laser structure is straightforward, robust, low-cost, and can be implemented using existing wafer-scale silicon photonics fabrication processes and a single room-temperature post-processing step. In contrast to previous rare-earth lasers, the laser cavity and output are directly in the silicon layer, and the ultra-compact device size of 40-µm-diameter is on a scale compatible with standard passive and active silicon photonic devices. We show single-mode lasing around 1.9 µm using a monolithic thulium-doped tellurite gain medium and efficient pumping at wavelengths around 1.6 µm, where silicon is highly transparent and commercial pump light sources are readily available. Besides demonstrating an effective and low-cost approach to rare-earth gain for silicon photonic microsystems, such lasers provide an incentive for expanding applications in an emerging 2-µm wavelength band, which is of interest for communications, nonlinear and quantum optics, and sensing and is motivated by silicon's lower two-photon absorption and the recent development of efficient monolithic passive and active silicon devices in this range. Optical gain and lasing in a hybrid rare-earth silicon structure opens the door to on-chip amplifiers for low-loss circuits and versatile integrated laser designs, using the wideband rare-earth gain available in different near- and mid-infrared wavelength regions of interest and the high-performance passive and active functionality in the silicon layer, on silicon photonics platforms.
Journal Reference:
Khadijeh Miarabbas Kiani, Henry C. Frankis, Cameron M. Naraine, et al. Lasing in a Hybrid Rare‐Earth Silicon Microdisk [open], Laser & Photonics Reviews (DOI: 10.1002/lpor.202100348)
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 30 2021, @05:52AM
Now all we need is sharks on silicon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 30 2021, @01:19PM (1 child)
very good! opto-couplers inside chips!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 30 2021, @07:36PM
Can any fab-heads out there enlighten us whether optical decoupling of different sides of a chip would ever make sense? Do ground loops happen at nano-scale?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bd on Wednesday December 01 2021, @07:03AM
I guess the pumping at wavelengths around 1.6 µm is the catch here. That prevents this from being true "silicon photonics" where the aim is to make optical circuits using nothing but the established silicon manufacturing process, so that complex photonic devices do not cost around 5000$ a piece anymore.