While soliton microcombs offer the potential for integration of powerful frequency metrology and precision spectroscopy systems, their operation requires complex startup and feedback protocols that necessitate difficult-to-integrate optical and electrical components. Moreover, CMOS-rate microcombs, required in nearly all comb systems, have resisted integration because of their power requirements. Here, a regime for turnkey operation of soliton microcombs co-integrated with a pump laser is demonstrated and theoretically explained. Significantly, a new operating point is shown to appear from which solitons are generated through binary turn-on and turn-off of the pump laser, thereby eliminating all photonic/electronic control circuitry. These features are combined with high-Q Si3N4 resonators to fully integrate into a butterfly package microcombs with CMOS frequencies as low as 15 GHz, offering compelling advantages for high-volume production.

Driven by narrow-linewidth bench-top lasers, coherent optical systems spanning optical communications, metrology and sensing provide unrivalled performance. To transfer these capabilities from the laboratory to the real world, a key missing ingredient is a mass-produced integrated laser with superior coherence. Here, we bridge conventional semiconductor lasers and coherent optical systems using CMOS-foundry-fabricated microresonators with record high Q factor over 260 million and finesse over 42,000. Five orders-of-magnitude noise reduction in the pump laser is demonstrated, and for the first time, fundamental noise below 1 Hz 2 Hz −1 is achieved in an electrically-pumped integrated laser. Moreover, the same configuration is shown to relieve dispersion requirements for microcomb generation that have handicapped certain nonlinear platforms. The simultaneous realization of record-high Q factor, highly coherent lasers and frequency combs using foundry-based technologies paves the way for volume manufacturing of a wide range of coherent optical systems.

†All three authors contributed equally to this work pg. 2 Recent advances in nonlinear optics have revolutionized the area of integrated photonics, providing on-chip solutions to a wide range of new applications. Currently, the state of the art integrated nonlinear photonic devices are mainly based on dielectric material platforms, such as Si3N4 and SiO2. While semiconductor materials hold much higher nonlinear coefficients and convenience in active integration, they suffered in the past from high waveguide losses that prevented the realization of highly efficient nonlinear processes on-chip. Here we challenge this status quo and demonstrate an ultra-low loss AlGaAs-on-insulator (AlGaAsOI) platform with anomalous dispersion and quality (Q) factors beyond 1.5 × 10 6 . Such a high quality factor, combined with the high nonlinear coefficient and the small mode volume, enabled us to demonstrate a record low Kerr frequency comb generation threshold of ~36 µW for a resonator with a 1 THz free spectral range (FSR), ~100 times lower compared to that in previous semiconductor platform. Combs with >250 nm broad span have been generated under a pump power lower than the threshold power of state of the art dielectric micro combs. A soliton-step transition has also been observed for the first time from an AlGaAs resonator. This work is an important step towards ultra-efficient semiconductor-based nonlinear photonics and will lead to fully integrated nonlinear photonic integrated circuits (PICs) in near future. pg. 3 The extensive research on integrated nonlinear photonics in the last few years, driven by the breakthrough of the microcomb and other on-chip nonlinear devices, has opened up many new opportunities for on-chip integrated photonics, ranging from spectroscopy to atomic clock applications [1-3]. The demand to construct efficient nonlinear devices has motivated the development of different material platforms in nonlinear photonics. A common endeavor of those efforts is the reduction of the waveguide propagation loss, which is essential to enable high Q cavities so as to enhance the build-up power in the resonators and therefore increase the efficiency of the nonlinear optical processes [4]. In this regard, silica on silicon resonators [5-7] have long been dominant offering Q factors as high as 1 billion [6]. These devices can access a wide range of nonlinear effects including microwave rate soliton microcombs [8].However, over the last 5 years, there has been remarkable progress to significantly improve the Q factors of resonators in many other nonlinear integrated optical material platforms. One example is the Si3N4 platform, which delivers high performance in Kerr comb generation on chip [9][10][11]. The Si3N4 micro-resonators have enabled the generation of efficient frequency combs with repetition rates from microwave to THz frequencies [12] and improved Q factor of beyond 30 million [13,14]. Another material, which recently attracted attention, is LiNbO3. It offers additional opportunities for integrated nonlinear...

No abstract

Silicon photonics enables wafer-scale integration of optical functionalities on chip. Silicon-based laser frequency combs can provide integrated sources of mutually coherent laser lines for terabit-per-second transceivers, parallel coherent light detection and ranging, or photonics-assisted signal processing. We report heterogeneously integrated laser soliton microcombs combining both indium phospide/silicon (InP/Si) semiconductor lasers and ultralow-loss silicon nitride (Si3N4) microresonators on a monolithic silicon substrate. Thousands of devices can be produced from a single wafer by using complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor–compatible techniques. With on-chip electrical control of the laser-microresonator relative optical phase, these devices can output single-soliton microcombs with a 100-gigahertz repetition rate. Furthermore, we observe laser frequency noise reduction due to self-injection locking of the InP/Si laser to the Si3N4 microresonator. Our approach provides a route for large-volume, low-cost manufacturing of narrow-linewidth, chip-based frequency combs for next-generation high-capacity transceivers, data centers, space and mobile platforms.