superior performance with respect to speed and operation bandwidth than electronic based devices. [3-5] As a fundamental χ (3) process, FWM has found a wide range of applications in wavelength conversion, [6,7] optical frequency comb generation, [8,9] optical sampling, [10,11] quantum entanglement, [12,13] and many others. [14,15] Implementing nonlinear photonic devices in integrated form offers the greatest dividend in terms of compact footprint, high stability, high scalability, and mass-producibility. [1,2,16] Although silicon has been a leading platform for integrated photonic devices for many reasons, [1] including the fact that it leverages the well-developed complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication technologies, [17] its strong twophoton absorption (TPA) at near-infrared telecommunications wavelengths poses a fundamental limitation for devices operating in this wavelength region. Other CMOS compatible platforms such as silicon nitride (SiN) and doped silica [2,18] have a much lower TPA, although they still suffer from intrinsic limitation arising from a much lower Kerr nonlinearity. The increasing demand for high performing nonlinear integrated photonic devices has motivated the search for highly

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Efficient nonlinear phenomena in integrated waveguides imply the realization in a nonlinear material of tightly confining waveguides sustaining guided modes with a small effective area with ultra-low propagation losses as well as high-power damage thresholds. However, when the waveguide cross-sectional dimensions keep shrinking, propagation losses and the probability of failure events tend to increase dramatically. In this work, we report both the fabrication and testing of high-confinement, ultralow-loss silicon nitride waveguides and resonators showing average attenuation coefficients as low as ∼3 dB/m across the S-, C-, and L bands for 1.6-µm-width × 800-nm-height dimensions, with intrinsic quality factors approaching ∼10 7 in the C band. The present technology results in very high cross-wafer device performance uniformities, low thermal susceptibility, and high power damage thresholds. In particular, we developed here an optimized fully subtractive process introducing a novel chemical-physical multistep annealing and encapsulation fabrication method, resulting in high quality Si 3 N 4-based photonic integrated circuits for energy-efficient nonlinear photonics and quantum optics.

Silicon photonics is one of the most prominent technology platforms for integrated photonics and can support a wide variety of applications. As we move towards a mature industrial core technology, we present the integration of silicon nitride (SiN) material to extend the capabilities of our silicon photonics platform. Depending on the application being targeted, we have developed several integration strategies for the incorporation of SiN. We present these processes, as well as key components for dedicated applications. In particular, we present the use of SiN for athermal multiplexing in optical transceivers for datacom applications, the nonlinear generation of frequency combs in SiN micro-resonators for ultra-high data rate transmission, spectroscopy or metrology applications and the use of SiN to realize optical phased arrays in the 800–1000 nm wavelength range for Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) applications. These functionalities are demonstrated using a 200 mm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible pilot line, showing the versatility and scalability of the Si-SiN platform.

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In this letter, the authors report the first demonstration of laser operation in long-wavelength opticallypumped vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers for photonics-oncomplementary metal-oxide-semiconductor back-end integration using 1-D double photonic crystal mirrors. The full exploitation of surface-addressable slow Bloch modes in such photonic architectures promotes an optimized tailoring of light confinement resulting in compact single-mode emitters capable to operate continuous-wave with thresholds in the sub-mW range.

Silicon-nitride-on-insulator (SiNOI) is an attractive platform for optical frequency comb generation in the telecommunication band because of the low two-photon absorption and free carrier induced nonlinear loss when compared with crystalline silicon. However, high-temperature annealing that has been used so far for demonstrating Si3N4-based frequency combs made co-integration with silicon-based optoelectronics elusive, thus reducing dramatically its effective complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatibility. We report here on the fabrication and testing of annealing-free SiNOI nonlinear photonic circuits. In particular, we have developed a process to fabricate low-loss, annealing-free, and crack-free Si3N4 740-nm-thick films for Kerr-based nonlinear photonics featuring a full process compatibility with front-end silicon photonics. Experimental evidence shows that micro-resonators using such annealing-free silicon nitride films are capable of generating a frequency comb spanning 1300–2100 nm via optical parametrical oscillation based on four-wave mixing. This work constitutes a decisive step toward time-stable power-efficient Kerr-based broadband sources featuring full process compatibility with Si photonic integrated circuits on CMOS lines.

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