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Published December 1, 2020 | public
Journal Article

High-speed Coherent Optical Communication with Isolator-free Heterogeneous Si/III-V Lasers

Abstract

Coherent optical communication is considered as an indispensable solution to the ever-increasing demand for higher data rates. To reduce the cost and form factor of coherent transceivers, full integration of photonic devices including lasers, modulators, amplifiers, photodetectors, and other components is necessary. However, as fabricating optical isolators on chip remains extremely challenging, optical feedback, which can degrade the coherence of semiconductor lasers, becomes the main obstacle, thwarting large-scale photonic integration. An appealing solution to such a problem is to use semiconductor lasers with intrinsic insensitivity to optical feedback as the integrated light sources. The heterogenous Si/III-V lasers, with their built-in high-Q resonators, are expected to possess a robustness to optical feedback which exceeds by several orders of magnitude compared to commercial III-V distributed feedback (DFB) lasers, which will be validated here. We present data showing that the heterogeneous Si/III-V lasers can preserve their phase coherence under much larger optical feedback and therefore function without severe degradation in isolator-free coherent optical communication systems.

Additional Information

© 2020 IEEE. Manuscript received May 28, 2020; revised July 27, 2020; accepted August 5, 2020. Date of publication August 11, 2020; date of current version December 2, 2020. This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation under Grant Y501119, in part by DARPA MTO under Grant N66001-14-1-4062, and in part by US Army Research Office under Grant W911NF-16-C-0026 and Grant W911NF-14-P-0020. We would like to thank the technical and fabrication infrastructure support from Kavli Nanoscience Institute at California Institute of Technology.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023