Hybrid Silicon Laser - Uses

Uses

Intel suggests this light source could be used for optical communications when integrated with silicon photonics. Silicon manufacturing and fabrication is widely used in the electronic industry to mass-produce low-cost electronic devices. Silicon photonics uses these same electronic manufacturing technologies to make low cost integrated optical devices. One issue with using silicon for an optical device is that silicon is a poor light emitter and cannot be used to make an electrically pumped laser. This means that lasers have first to be fabricated on a separate III-V semiconductor wafer before being individually aligned to each silicon device, in a process that is both costly and time-consuming, limiting the total number of lasers that can be used on a silicon photonic circuit.

By using this wafer bonding technique many hybrid silicon lasers can be fabricated simultaneously on a silicon wafer, all aligned to the silicon photonic devices. Potential uses cited in the references below include fabricating many, possibly hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers on a die and using silicon photonics to combine them together to form high bandwidth optical links for personal computers, servers or back planes.