A photonic integrated circuit–based erbium-doped amplifier

Abstract

Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers revolutionized long-haul optical communications and laser technology. Erbium ions could provide a basis for efficient optical amplification in photonic integrated circuits but their use remains impractical as a result of insufficient output power. We demonstrate a photonic integrated circuit–based erbium amplifier reaching 145 milliwatts of output power and more than 30 decibels of small-signal gain—on par with commercial fiber amplifiers and surpassing state-of-the-art III-V heterogeneously integrated semiconductor amplifiers. We apply ion implantation to ultralow–loss silicon nitride (Si 3 N 4 ) photonic integrated circuits, which are able to increase the soliton microcomb output power by 100 times, achieving power requirements for low-noise photonic microwave generation and wavelength-division multiplexing optical communications. Endowing Si 3 N 4 photonic integrated circuits with gain enables the miniaturization of various fiber-based devices such as high–pulse-energy femtosecond mode-locked lasers.

Guided-acoustic stimulated Brillouin scattering in silicon nitride photonic circuits

“…4 , the optimized SBS waveguides can be integrated with advanced microwave photonic spectral shaping circuits ( 57 , 58 ) to form an all-integrated high-resolution RF filter with a low insertion loss, low noise figure, and ultrahigh dynamic range. Furthermore, the development of high-power erbium-doped waveguide amplifiers in silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits ( 47 ) will overcome the current necessities of off-chip EDFAs and, at the same time, enable increased link gain. Last, we expect that the implementation of SBS lasers in this optimized silicon nitride waveguide geometry can open the path to full integration of the pump and the SBS lasers (see the Supplementary Materials for SBS laser threshold calculation) and can intersect SBS lasers with Kerr microcombs ( 59 – 62 ) for versatile sources in silicon nitride platform.…”

“…Harnessing SBS in silicon nitride, which is an emerging lowloss (32)(33)(34)(35) and versatile (36)(37)(38) integration platform, can unlock promising technologies including lasers (15,(39)(40)(41), frequency combs (42)(43)(44)(45), microwave photonics (6,38,46), and onchip am plifiers (47). However, the investigation of SBS in standard silicon nitride waveguides is still in its infancy, and the measured effect is relatively weak.…”

Chip-Based High-Dimensional Optical Neural Network

“…The possible solution is applying a faster adjuster, electro-optic modulation, or thermal deposition to reduce the thermal crosstalk. The integrated turn-key single SMC source [36][37][38], on-chip modulator [39,40], amplifier [41], detector [42], WDM, low-loss waveguide [43,44], optical storage [45], and excellent coupling will promote the implementation of the future-oriented monolithic multi-layer ONN processor and their applications.…”

An Integrated Photon-Pair Source with Monolithic Piezoelectric Frequency Tunability

“…The latter is especially advantageous with regards to interfacing between different quantum technology platforms, as some platforms (such as many quantum memories based on rare-earth ions) are not at telecom wavelengths [7][8][9]. Moreover, key components such as narrow-linewidth lasers [31], amplifiers [32], and filters [33] can be fully integrated on a single chip, leading to mass manufacturable miniaturised quantum systems. Photonic integrated Si 3 N 4 microresonators have already shown they are well suited to the production of narrow-band photons at telecom wavelengths.…”