Loss-Compensating Si Photonics Signal Routers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost silicon photonic chip that can route and amplify light simultaneously, effectively compensating for insertion losses in photonic networks, with promising high-speed performance.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated photonic device using standard Si/SiO2 ring resonators with Er:Al2O3 cladding, achieving on-chip amplification with simple fabrication steps.

Findings

Achieved 0.9 dB on/off gain in a compact device

Demonstrated potential for 40 Gb/s bit rates

Proposed method for increasing gain with coupled rings

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a low-cost integrated photonic chip fabricated in a SOI foundry capable of simultaneously routing and amplifying light in a chip. This device is able to compensate insertion losses in photonic routers. It consists of standard Si/SiO2 ring resonators with Er:Al2O3 as the upper cladding layer, employed using only one simple post-processing step. This resulted in a measured on/off gain of 0.9 dB, with a footprint smaller than 0.002 mm2, and expected bit rates as high as 40Gb/s based on the resonance quality-factor. We show that the on/off gain value can be further increased using coupled rings to reach net gain values of 4 dB.