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.

High optical quality (Q) factors are critically important in optical microcavities, where performance in applications spanning nonlinear optics to cavity quantum electrodynamics is determined. Here, a record Q factor of over 1.1 billion is demonstrated for on-chip optical resonators. Using silica whispering-gallery resonators on silicon, Q-factor data is measured over wavelengths spanning the C/L bands (100 nm) and for a range of resonator sizes and mode families. A record low sub-milliwatt parametric oscillation threshold is also measured in 9 GHz free-spectral-range devices. The results show the potential for thermal silica on silicon as a resonator material.

Since its invention, optical frequency comb has revolutionized a broad range of subjects from metrology to spectroscopy. The recent development of microresonator-based frequency combs (microcombs) provides a unique pathway to create frequency comb systems on a chip. Indeed, microcomb-based spectroscopy, ranging, optical synthesizer, telecommunications and astronomical calibrations have been reported recently. Critical to many of the integrated comb systems is the broad coverage of comb spectra. Here, microcombs of more than two-octave span (450 nm to 2,008 nm) is demonstrated through χ (2) and χ (3) nonlinearities in a deformed silica microcavity. The deformation lifts the circular symmetry and creates chaotic tunneling channels that enable broadband collection of intracavity emission with a single waveguide. Our demonstration introduces a new degree of freedom, cavity deformation, to the microcomb studies, and our microcomb spectral range is useful for applications in optical clock, astronomical calibration and biological imaging.