Phys.org  April 16, 2021 Researchers in Switzerland have developed a new technology for building silicon nitride integrated photonic circuits with record low optical losses and small footprints. They used Damascene process to make integrated circuits of optical losses of only 1 dB/m. Such low loss significantly reduces the power budget for building chip-scale optical frequency combs (“microcombs”), used in applications like coherent optical transceivers, low-noise microwave synthesizers, LiDAR, neuromorphic computing, and even optical atomic clocks. The team used the new technology to develop meter-long waveguides on 5×5 mm2 chips and high-quality-factor microresonators. They also report high fabrication yield, which is […]