Silicon Photonics: Recent Development on Silicon Based Laser Amplifier and Wavelength Converter

Summary form only given. Silicon photonics technology has made rapid progress in recent years achieving several key breakthroughs; it offers promising low-cost optoelectronic solutions for applications ranging from telecommunications to chip-to-chip interconnects and to emerging areas such as optical sensing and bio-medical applications. In particular, chipscale silicon lasers and amplifiers based on stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) [3-8], and efficient wavelength converters based on four-wave mixing (FWM) and coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) [9-11] have been successfully demonstrated. In these proof-of-principle demonstrations, linear silicon waveguides are used, and laser cavities have been either external or formed by applying multi-layer optical coatings onto the chip facets. For practical applications, we have developed a fully monolithic integrated ring resonator architecture for silicon lasers, amplifiers and wavelength converters.