A joint lab of CEA Leti, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France, and Thales Research and Technology called CEA-Leti and III-V lab has recently declared that it has established an integrated tunable transmitter on silicon.
This is the first time where the integration of a tunable laser source has been carried out on silicon. This indeed is an achievement towards fully integrated transceivers.
A hybrid III-V/Si laser fabricated by direct bonding has been incorporated in the transmitter, representing a silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator having high extinction ratio up to 10 dB and wavelength tunability of 9 nm. This contributes to a superior bit-error-rate performance reaching 10 Gb/s. The outcome resulted through the support of the University of Surrey for their contribution on the design of the modulator and Ghent University-IMEC for the laser design. The result was based on the European funded HELIOS project.
Furthermore, single wavelength tunable lasers, tuning range of 45 nm, 21 mA threshold at 20°C, and side mode suppression ratio > 40dB over the tuning range, have been demonstrated by CEA-Leti and III-V lab.
Review on these results is being conducted at the Optical Fiber Communication conference 2012, which is being conducted from March 4 to 8, 2012 in Los Angeles, USA.
The integration of materials such as InP onto silicon wafers can be performed based on the heterogeneous integration process formulated by the CEA-Leti and III-V lab. The fabrication process is initiated on 200 mm Silicon on Insulator (SOI) wafers, wherein fabrication of silicon waveguides and modulators occurs on CEA-Leti 200 mm CMOS pilot line.
The CEA-Leti is taking part at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC 2012), which is taking place between March 4 and 8, 2012, in Los Angeles.
Source: http://www.leti.fr/