InP Microdisk Lasers Integrated on Si for Optical Interconnects

Abstract

Abstract-We review recent theoretical and experimental work on InP membrane microdisk lasers heterogeneously integrated on SOI and coupled to a Si bus waveguide. The lasers can now be fabricated with very high yield, have typical threshold currents of 0.5 mA and output powers of tens of μW, while the total power consumption is restricted to 5 mW. First, we describe various improvements in the fabrication technology and interesting results on the uniformity in device characteristics. In a second part, unidirectional behaviour and reflection sensitivity are briefly discussed. The third part is focused on optical signal regeneration with microdisk lasers. The last part contains a brief summary of optical interconnects based on heterogeneously integrated microdisk lasers and heterogeneously integrated photodetectors.

Crack-Free Silicon-Nitride-on-Insulator Nonlinear Circuits for Continuum Generation in the ${C}$ -Band

“…This solution requires wavelength tuning, using e.g., heaters, which increase both the circuit complexity and power consumption. Another way to increase link capacity, while keeping steady the energy-per-bit is to shrink the size of the laser diodes by using micro-disk architectures [8] or vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers on Si [9], having access to a larger number of wavelengths. Moreover, recent solutions based on comb laser-driven dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) silicon photonic transmitters via microring modulators may well increase the total aggregate bandwidth of the link, but the number of transmission channels remains limited to the quantum dot gain region, typically a few nanometers [12].…”

Advanced Integration Techniques on Broadband Millimeter-Wave Beam Steering for 5G Wireless Networks and Beyond

“…Lasers with very low threshold current have been demonstrated in both III-V/Si and III-V membrane platforms. Threshold current below 10 mA in linear laser cavities [99], [100] and 0.5 mA in a micro-disk cavity [109] have been recently demonstrated in III-V/Si platform. On the other hand, since the III-V membrane platform allows for novel layerstack design, the laser threshold can be further reduced.…”

III-V-on-Silicon Photonic Devices for Optical Communication and Sensing

“…Reproduced from [50]. © 2013 IEEE Finally, by using an epitaxial layer stack with detector layers stacked on top of the laser epitaxial structure, it is possible to densely co-integrate detectors with microdisk lasers enabling the realization of compact bidirectional optical links on silicon [51,52]. Photodetectors fabricated using such epitaxial structure, bonded onto an SOI waveguide, had dark currents of 22 and 67 nA and responsivities of 0.69 and 0.73 A/W for lengths of 40 and 60 μm respectively.…”

“…The direct modulation bandwidth of the microdisk lasers was 7.8 GHz, but could be increased using injection locking methods. The bandwidth of photodetectors and microdisk lasers permitted the demonstration of a 10 Gbps SOI-based optical interconnect link [51,52]. Figure 15 shows the large signal modulation response for a complete link consisting of a heterogeneously integrated microdisk laser and photodetector on an SOI waveguide.…”