Nanowerk December 6, 2022
Despite remarkable manufacturing advantages, reliance on silicon-based waveguides currently limits the spectral window available to photonic integrated circuits (PICs). A team of researchers in the US (industry, UC Santa Barbara, Caltech) has developed a technique to enable photonic chips to operate in the visible-to-near-infrared spectrum by directly uniting III–V materials with silicon nitride waveguides on Si wafers. Using this technology, they fabricated a fully integrated PIC at photon energies greater than the bandgap of silicon, demonstrating essential photonic building blocks, including lasers, amplifiers, photodetectors, modulators, and passives, all operating at submicrometre wavelengths. Using this platform, they achieved unprecedented coherence and tunability in an integrated laser at short wavelength. By making use of this higher photon energy, they demonstrated high-temperature performance and kHz-level fundamental linewidths at elevated temperatures. According to the researchers the success of this integration strategy unlocks a broad range of new integrated photonics applications…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Fully integrated photonic platforms. Credit: Nature 610, 54–60 (2022)Â