Integration of passive components with high performance quantum dot lasers on silicon

摘要

It is well known that silicon photonics is one of the most promising alternatives to electronic interconnects. [1] And nearly all of the components of Silicon photonic interconnects have been individually demonstrated, such as, lasers, modulators and detectors. While the performance of these devices is now competitive with electronic-only interconnects, there still remain significant challenges to the realization of complete optical interconnects that are low-cost and have high performance and efficiency. One of the biggest challenges is the monolithic integration of robust and low-powered lasers with Silicon photonic devices. Specifically, current approaches are highly inefficient (<1% efficiency) and are not robust against temperature variations (requires T>40–60°C for operation). [2] While lasers that meet the performance requirements for future optical interconnect have been realized, they are challenging to seamlessly integrate with Silicon photonic components. One of the biggest challenges with current silicon-integrated III-V lasers is that they use quantum wells (QWs) and they are integrated with Si waveguides through inefficient evanescent coupling. As a result, they exhibit low efficiency and output power due to the poor overlap of the optical mode with the gain region and are not stable at the high temperatures required for future on-chip interconnects.