CMOS-compatible integrated optical hyper-parametric oscillator

Abstract

Integrated multiple-wavelength laser sources, critical for important applications such as high-precision broadband sensing and spectroscopy, molecular fingerprinting, optical clocks and attosecond physics, have recently been demonstrated in silica and single-crystal microtoroid resonators using parametric gain. However, for applications in telecommunications and optical interconnects, analogous devices compatible with a fully integrated platform do not yet exist. Here, we report a fully integrated, CMOS-compatible, multiple-wavelength source. We achieve optical hyper-parametric oscillation in a high-index silica-glass microring resonator with a differential slope efficiency above threshold of 7.4% for a single oscillating mode, a continuous-wave threshold power as low as 54mW, and a controllable range of frequency spacing from 200GHz to more than 6THz. The low loss, design flexibility and CMOS compatibility of this device will enable the creation of multiple-wavelength sources for telecommunications, computing, sensing, metrology and other areas. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.