High-Power (>300 mW) On-Chip Laser With Passively Aligned Silicon-Nitride Waveguide DBR Cavity

Abstract

We demonstrate a high-power on-chip 1550-nm laser implemented by passive flip-chip integration of a curved-channel, double-pass InGaAsP/InP slab-coupled optical waveguide amplifier (SCOWA) onto a photonic integrated circuit (PIC) containing a silicon nitride (SiN) waveguide and distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) grating. The combined chip-scale SCOW external cavity laser (SCOWECL) has single mode emission with 312 mW of optical power at a drive current of 2.5 A, and exhibits a side mode suppression ratio (SMSR) of 55 dB, peak photon conversion efficiency (PCE) of 10%, low relative-intensity noise (RIN) of ~160 dB/Hz, and an integrated linewidth of 192 kHz. Additionally, we demonstrate a multi-wavelength SCOWECL array comprised of four SCOWAs coupled to SiN-waveguide DBR gratings. The four-element array generates 80 mW per channel when the SCOWAs are driven in parallel (1.25 A/channel) with ~1-nm wavelength spacing centered at 1533 nm. We describe the fabrication and hybrid integration processes. The measured SCOWA-to-waveguide coupling loss is estimated to be 1.6 +/-1.0 dB which agrees well with the simulation.

Keywords

• Hybrid integration
• SiN photonics
• external cavity laser
• high power laser