News Release

High-power optical amplifier on a compact photonic chip

Peer-Reviewed Publication

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Addressing a long-standing challenge in photonic integrated circuit design, researchers demonstrate that a miniature erbium-doped waveguide amplifier provides efficient and high-power optical amplification on a compact photonic chip. “One intriguing potential for this on-chip waveguide amplifier is an on-chip femto­second mode-locked laser,” writes Jungwon Kim in a related Perspective. Our daily digital lives largely rely on ultra-broadband optical fiber networks that connect the globe. Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) – first developed in the 1980s – revolutionized long-haul optical communications enabling ultrafast transmission of information worldwide. In addition, the devices have also been crucial to the development of laser technologies widely used in interferometric sensing and other types of optical metrology. As technology progresses, conventional electronics-based circuit architecture is expected to be increasingly replaced with photonics-based technologies. However, in many cases, optical integrated circuits suffer from insufficient output power. Although an integrated chip-scale EDFA-like amplifier could address this limitation, its development has been wrought with challenges despite decades of work. Here, Yang Liu and colleagues present a high-power and low-noise erbium-doped waveguide amplifier (EDWA) integrated into a compact silicon nitride photonic chip. Using this approach, the authors created an erbium-doped silicon nitride waveguide into a footprint measuring only 1.2 millimeters by 3.6 millimeters. According to Lui et al., the tiny chip-based photonic integrated circuit they designed provided 145 megawatts (mW) of on-chip output power (from a 2.61 mW input) with less than 30 decibels of small-signal gain, which is on par with commercial EDFAs. The erbium ion implantation approach described by the authors could provide a basis for a variety of device applications, including integrated laser sources like high-power soliton microcombs and high-pulse-energy femtosecond mode-locked lasers. “Because the main techniques of ion doping and ultralow-loss silicon nitride wave guide fabrication are mature, large-volume manufacturing of such devices should be possible,” writes Kim in the related Perspective.


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