Microcomb-driven silicon photonic systems

TLDR

Microcombs enable diverse optical applications but typically require bulky, expensive, power‑hungry components, while silicon photonics offers scalable, low‑cost integration yet lacks parallel light sources for full functionality. The study aims to merge microcomb sources with CMOS silicon photonics to create compact, efficient photonic systems. This is achieved by employing a power‑efficient AlGaAsOI microcomb source to drive CMOS SiPh engines. They demonstrate a microcomb‑based integrated photonic data link achieving a two‑terabit‑per‑second aggregate rate with pulse‑amplitude four‑level modulation, and a highly reconfigurable microwave photonic filter using a time‑stretch approach, marking a key step toward fully integrated photonic systems.

Abstract

Abstract Microcombs have sparked a surge of applications over the past decade, ranging from optical communications to metrology 1–4 . Despite their diverse deployment, most microcomb-based systems rely on a large amount of bulky elements and equipment to fulfil their desired functions, which is complicated, expensive and power consuming. By contrast, foundry-based silicon photonics (SiPh) has had remarkable success in providing versatile functionality in a scalable and low-cost manner 5–7 , but its available chip-based light sources lack the capacity for parallelization, which limits the scope of SiPh applications. Here we combine these two technologies by using a power-efficient and operationally simple aluminium-gallium-arsenide-on-insulator microcomb source to drive complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor SiPh engines. We present two important chip-scale photonic systems for optical data transmission and microwave photonics, respectively. A microcomb-based integrated photonic data link is demonstrated, based on a pulse-amplitude four-level modulation scheme with a two-terabit-per-second aggregate rate, and a highly reconfigurable microwave photonic filter with a high level of integration is constructed using a time-stretch approach. Such synergy of a microcomb and SiPh integrated components is an essential step towards the next generation of fully integrated photonic systems.