CEA-Leti and III-V lab demonstrate integrated silicon photonics transmitter with hybrid tunable laser
The transmitter incorporates a hybrid III-V/Si laser-fabricated by direct bonding, which exhibits 9nm wavelength tunability and a silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator with high extinction ratio (up to 10 dB), leading to an excellent bit-error-rate performance at 10 Gb/s. The results were obtained in the frame of the European funded project HELIOS – www.helios-project.eu, with the contribution of Ghent University-IMEC for the design of the laser and University of Surrey for the design of the modulator.
CEA-Leti and III-V lab also demonstrated single wavelength tunable lasers, with 21mA threshold at 20°C, a 45nm tuning range and side mode suppression ratio larger than 40 dB over the tuning range. Silicon photonics is a very powerful technology, and CEA-Leti and III-V lab have now made a significant breakthrough in its development by integrating on the same chip complex devices such as a fully integrated transmitter working above 10Gb/s or a tunable single wavelength laser. One big obstacle to silicon photonics is the lack of optical sources on silicon, the base material on CMOS.
“We can overcome this problem by bonding III-V material, necessary for active light sources, onto a silicon wafer and then co-processing the two, thus accomplishing two things at once,” explained Martin Zirngibl, Bell Labs Physical Technologies Research leader. “Traditional CMOS processing is still used in the process, while at the same time we now can integrate active light sources directly onto silicon.”
Based on the heterogeneous integration process developed by the CEA-Leti and III-V lab, III-V materials such as InP can be integrated onto silicon wafers. The fabrication process starts on 200mm Silicon on Insulator (SOI) wafers where the silicon waveguides and modulators are fabricated on CEA-Leti 200mm CMOS pilot line.
Visit CEA-Leti at www.leti.fr
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