Heterogenously integrated InP on Si microdisk lasers

FEB 09-12, 2015International audienceWe review recent theoretical and experimental work on InP membrane microdisk lasers heterogeneously integrated on SOI and coupled to a Si bus waveguide. After a general introduction on the fabrication and the operation principles, we will describe various improvements in the fabrication technology. This includes improvements in the yield of the bonding of the InP die on the SOI die and in the controllability of the bonding layer thickness, as well as an optimization of the alignment of the microdisk with respect to the silicon waveguide and some proposals for better heat sinking and loss reduction. Improvement in the alignment and the bonding has led to interesting results on the uniformity in device characteristics. In a second part, unidirectional behaviour and reflection sensitivity will be briefly discussed. Theoretical, numerical and experimental results will be shown about the unidirectional behavior and it will be explained how unidirectional microdisk lasers can be a lot less sensitive to external reflections than other lasers. We will also show how such lasers can be used as optical signal regenerators that can work with low optical input powers and that have small power consumption. We will end with a description of demonstrations of optical interconnects based on heterogeneously integrated microdisk lasers and heterogeneously integrated photodetectors. Optical interconnects on chip have been demonstrated at 10 Gb/s. An epitaxial layer stack that contains both the laser and the detector structure has been used for this purpose