Peking University team overcomes a worldwide problem

On May 18, the Peking University team published an article on a new silicon-based optoelectronic integrated system on a chip driven by integrated microcavity optical flow. This is the first report in the world, which is of great significance to the practical application and popularization of optical frequency comb technology. meaning.

Optical combs, also known as optical frequency combs, have always been an important research hotspot in international optics. Previously, Professor Joho Lewis Hall of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States and Professor Theodor Hiansch of Max Planck Quantum Optics in Germany have both worked on optical combs. His outstanding contributions won the Nobel Prize in Physics. However, in recent years, the chip-level microcavity optical comb has been difficult to expand its application scope due to its compact size and low cost. Now the research team of Peking University has lasted three years and finally broke through this worldwide problem and realized the rest of the microcavity. The integration of components, such as pump lasers, passive/active processing devices, and circuit controller units on the microcavity optical comb, largely avoids the cost, size, and power consumption of the microcavity optical comb. weakened, and promoted the integration of the optical comb system level.

In the past 20 years, silicon photonics technology has been relying on mature CMOS technology to realize the large-scale integration of functional devices required by traditional optical systems, and to improve the speed and capacity of information transmission and processing. Revolutionary breakthroughs in the fields of generation of data centers, communication systems, high-performance computing, and autonomous driving have become the core technology of modern information systems and the main field of competition in the world of optoelectronics. At the same time, silicon-based light sources on silicon-based optoelectronic chips The question of demand also followed.

In order to solve the problem of the demand for silicon-based light sources, the research team of Peking University realized the demand for low-cost and high-stability parallel light sources by pumping integrated microcavity optical frequency combs by semiconductor lasers, and provided the required light source brains to complete a large-scale The efficient parallelization of the integrated system breaks through the bottleneck of the silicon-based light source in the microcavity optical comb, and makes a significant contribution to the development of the next-generation multi-dimensional silicon photonics integrated microsystem sub-discipline.

Although silicon-based optoelectronic chips are still in the breakthrough stage, with the application of relevant research results in data centers, 5/6G communications, autonomous driving, optical computing and other fields, a new architecture of on-chip optoelectronic integrated systems will be completely formed.