Hybrid external-cavity lasers (ECL) using photonic wire bonds as coupling elements

Combining semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) on direct-bandgap III–V substrates with low-loss silicon or silicon-nitride photonic integrated circuits (PIC) has been key to chip-scale external-cavity lasers (ECL) that offer wideband tunability along with small optical linewidths. However, fabrication of such devices still relies on technologically demanding monolithic integration of heterogeneous material systems or requires costly high-precision package-level assembly, often based on active alignment, to achieve low-loss coupling between the SOA and the external feedback circuits. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel class of hybrid ECL that overcome these limitations by exploiting 3D-printed photonic wire bonds as intra-cavity coupling elements. Photonic wire bonds can be written in-situ in a fully automated process with shapes adapted to the mode-field sizes and the positions of the chips at both ends, thereby providing low-loss coupling even in presence of limited placement accuracy. In a proof-of-concept experiment, we use an InP-based reflective SOA (RSOA) along with a silicon photonic external feedback circuit and demonstrate a single-mode tuning range from 1515 to 1565 nm along with side mode suppression ratios above 40 dB and intrinsic linewidths down to 105 kHz. Our approach combines the scalability advantages of monolithic integration with the performance and flexibility of hybrid multi-chip assemblies and may thus open a path towards integrated ECL on a wide variety of integration platforms.

Novel Low-Loss Fiber-Chip Edge Coupler for Coupling Standard Single Mode Fibers to Silicon Photonic Wire Waveguides

Fiber-to-chip optical interconnects is a big challenge in silicon photonics application scenarios such as data centers and optical transmission systems. An edge coupler, compared to optical grating, is appealing to in the application of silicon photonics due to the high coupling efficiency between standard optical fibers (SMF-28) and the sub-micron silicon wire waveguides. In this work, we proposed a novel fiber–chip edge coupler approach with a large mode size for silicon photonic wire waveguides. The edge coupler consists of a multiple structure which was fulfilled by multiple silicon nitride layers embedded in SiO2 upper cladding, curved waveguides and two adiabatic spot size converter (SSC) sections. The multiple structure can allow light directly coupling from large mode size fiber-to-chip coupler, and then the curved waveguides and SSCs transmit the evanescent field to a 220 nm-thick silicon wire waveguide based on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. The edge coupler, designed for a standard SMF-28 fiber with 8.2 μm mode field diameter (MFD) at a wavelength of 1550 nm, exhibits a mode overlap efficiency exceeding 95% at the chip facet and the overall coupling exceeding 90%. The proposed edge coupler is fully compatible with standard microfabrication processes.