High-Performance O-Band Quantum-Dot Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers Directly Grown on a CMOS Compatible Silicon Substrate

Abstract

High gain and high saturation output power silicon-based semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) are essential elements in future large-scale silicon photonic integrated circuits (PICs) to compensate for the excess power penalties that are introduced by large numbers of passive components. We present here, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, an O-band quantum-dot (QD) SOA that is directly grown on a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor compatible on-axis (001) silicon substrate. The QD-SOA demonstrates a > 100 nm gain bandwidth with an on-chip gain larger than 20 dB at 20 °C. A gain maxima of 39 dB occurs at the ground state peak wavelength with a 23 dBm saturation output power. P-modulation doping in the dot spacer layers is important to achieve higher gains (>20 dB) at high temperature (70 °C) with a 21 nm bandwidth. A fiber-to-fiber noise figure as low as 6.1 dB and a wall plug efficiency as high as 19.7% are also shown. The performance shows that the Si-based QD-SOAs can be important for Si PICs and employed under uncooled scenarios.

PINE: Photonic Integrated Networked Energy efficient datacenters (ENLITENED Program) [Invited]

“…Such high-performance SOAs are an enabler of optically switched networks by compensating for insertion loss in optical switches and increasing the operating link margin. The performance demonstrated here compares favorably in all figures of merit against standalone native substrate SOAs and heterogeneously integrated devices on a SiPs platform (detailed comparison in [12]). This suggests direct growth on Si could provide a highly scalable manufacturing platform for not only as-grown SOAs but also for heterogeneous integration via wafer bonding and hybrid integration via edge coupling.…”

“…Phase 1 SOAs demonstrated record performance with on-chip small signal gain as high as 39 dB, noise figure 6.6 dB, and saturation output power of 24 dBm (Fig. 17) [12]. Such high-performance SOAs are an enabler of optically switched networks by compensating for insertion loss in optical switches and increasing the operating link margin.…”

“…Our fully integrated comb laser with experimentally demonstrated 41% power pump conversion drives the PINE phase 1 links [11]. The PINE architecture extends scalability with high-efficiency semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and the first monolithic quantum dot (QD) SOA on silicon demonstrated record wall-plug efficiency (WPE) of 14.2% and on-chip gain of 39 dB [12]. The MCM platform also advanced passive alignment high-density optical fiber chip-IO with demonstrated robustness to temperature and fabrication variations while maintaining a penalty of less than 0.6 dB on the coupling efficiency [13,14].…”

Recent Advances in InAs Quantum Dot Lasers Grown on On‐Axis (001) Silicon by Molecular Beam Epitaxy

“…A 3 dB bandwidth of 6.5 GHz and direct modulation of FP QD lasers up to 12 Gbps have been achieved. We have also demonstrated a single‐section mode‐locked QD laser on silicon that generates 490 fs optical pulses at a 31 GHz repetition rate, which is promising for potential applications such as wavelength division multiplexing systems . The unique carrier localizations by QDs can also be used to realize ultra‐small lasers on silicon.…”

Nonlinear Dynamics in Semiconductor Quantum Dot Laser Subject to Double Delayed Feedback: Numerical Analysis

“…Therefore, by generating different wide band gaps, the absorption and emission wavelengths of QD are tunable. So, the property of scale-dependent emission wavelength for QD is widely applied in various technologies such as optical display [27], laser amplification [28], emission [29], and photodetector [30]. Therefore, the feature of strong carrier confinement in semiconductor QD structure will play a very important role in laser device.…”