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A low-fabrication-temperature, high-gain chip-scale waveguide amplifier

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Abstract

The increasing prevalence of integrated on-chip optoelectronic devices has identified serious issues regarding inter-device transmission and coupling losses, highlighting an urgent need for on-chip waveguide amplifiers to compensate for these losses. Compared with other Er-based optical materials, erbium silicate is ideally suited to high-efficiency on-chip amplifiers and lasers because of its extremely high Er3+ concentration (1022 cm−3). Nevertheless, erbium silicate must be annealed above 1000°C to crystallize and activate the Er3+, which damages other on-chip optoelectronic components and is not conducive to device integration. Here, we report a low-fabrication-temperature, high-luminescence-efficiency gain material by adding Bi2O3 to an erbium-ytterbium silicate mixed film. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed film crystallizes at 600° C while the activation of Er3+ is also achieved, which is the lowest activation temperature of on-chip waveguide amplifier to our knowledge. This material forms the basis for a new chip-scale waveguide amplifier design, with a theoretical multi-energy-level model of Bi-Er-Yb in the mixed thin films used to analyze its signal enhancement properties. We achieve a peak on-chip gain of 23 dB in a 3.3-mm-long waveguide under the pump and signal powers of 300 mW and 1 µW, respectively. These results highlight the potential of the proposed material for realizing on-chip amplifiers and lasers for large-scale nanophotonic integrated circuits.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61635001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Department of Electronics, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Bo Wang, Peiqi Zhou & Xingjun Wang

  2. Institute of Microelectronics, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Peiqi Zhou & Yandong He

  3. Frontier Science Center for Nano-optoelectronics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Xingjun Wang

  4. Peking University Yangtze Delta Institute of Optoelectronics, Nantong, 226010, China

    Xingjun Wang

  5. Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Xingjun Wang

Authors
  1. Bo Wang
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  2. Peiqi Zhou
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  3. Xingjun Wang
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  4. Yandong He
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xingjun Wang.

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Wang, B., Zhou, P., Wang, X. et al. A low-fabrication-temperature, high-gain chip-scale waveguide amplifier. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 65, 162405 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-021-3360-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-021-3360-0

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