Lasers in Generic Photonic Foundry Platforms

Generic photonic integration technology is rapidly gaining popularity. In this technology a large variety of components and circuits can be built on a single chip from a small set of basic building blocks, such as optical amplifiers, modulators, detectors and passive components like couplers, filters and multiplexers. Also a variety of lasers can be constructed from building blocks like optical amplifiers, (tunable) on-chip reflectors, saturable absorbers and phase shifters. In the presentation the concept of generic photonic integration technology will be explained, and a number of lasers realised in this technology will be discussed. Further, some developments towards nanolasers with very small footprint and energy consumption will be reviewed.