Microcomb-driven silicon photonic systems

Abstract

Microcombs have sparked a surge of applications over the past decade, ranging from optical communications to metrology1–4. Despite their diverse deployment, most microcomb-based systems rely on a large amount of bulky elements and equipment to fulfil their desired functions, which is complicated, expensive and power consuming. By contrast, foundry-based silicon photonics (SiPh) has had remarkable success in providing versatile functionality in a scalable and low-cost manner5–7, but its available chip-based light sources lack the capacity for parallelization, which limits the scope of SiPh applications. Here we combine these two technologies by using a power-efficient and operationally simple aluminium-gallium-arsenide-on-insulator microcomb source to drive complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor SiPh engines. We present two important chip-scale photonic systems for optical data transmission and microwave photonics, respectively. A microcomb-based integrated photonic data link is demonstrated, based on a pulse-amplitude four-level modulation scheme with a two-terabit-per-second aggregate rate, and a highly reconfigurable microwave photonic filter with a high level of integration is constructed using a time-stretch approach. Such synergy of a microcomb and SiPh integrated components is an essential step towards the next generation of fully integrated photonic systems.

Chip-Based High-Dimensional Optical Neural Network

“…The possible solution is applying a faster adjuster, electro-optic modulation, or thermal deposition to reduce the thermal crosstalk. The integrated turn-key single SMC source [36][37][38], on-chip modulator [39,40], amplifier [41], detector [42], WDM, low-loss waveguide [43,44], optical storage [45], and excellent coupling will promote the implementation of the future-oriented monolithic multi-layer ONN processor and their applications.…”

Photonic Multiplexing Techniques for Optical Neuromorphic Computing

“…Microcombs generated via parametric oscillation in high-Q micro-resonators, are promising optical frequency comb sources, as they offer a large number of wavelengths in integrated platforms. Significant advances have been made in microcombs, leading to a wideband, compact, high-energy-efficiency (even battery driven operation), turnkey and mass-producible comb sources for WDM-based ONNs [173][174][175][176][177][178][179][180][181][182][183].…”

Integrated Passive Nonlinear Optical Isolators

“…The effort to integrate high-performance optical systems on-chip has made tremendous progress in recent years. Advancements in ultra-low-loss photonic platforms [1], nonlinear photonics [2], and heterogenous material integration [1,3] have enabled fully integrated turnkey frequency comb sources [1,4], on-chip lasers with Hertz linewidth [5], Tbps communications on-chip [6,7], on-chip optical amplifiers [8], and much more. While these systems will continue to improve, a lack of integrated optical isolation limits their performance.…”