Latest advances in high-performance light sources and optical amplifiers on silicon

Efficient light generation and amplification has long been missing on the silicon platform due to its well-known indirect bandgap nature. Driven by the size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) requirements, the desire to fully realize integrated silicon electronic and photonic integrated circuits has greatly pushed the effort of realizing high performance on-chip lasers and amplifiers moving forward. Several approaches have been proposed and demonstrated to address this issue. In this paper, a brief overview of recent progress of the high-performance lasers and amplifiers on Si based on different technology is presented. Representative device demonstrations, including ultra-narrow linewidth III–V/Si lasers, fully integrated III–V/Si/Si3N4 lasers, high-channel count mode locked quantum dot (QD) lasers, and high gain QD amplifiers will be covered.