Integrated rare-Earth doped mode-locked lasers on a CMOS platform

Mode-locked lasers provide extremely low jitter optical pulse trains for a number of applications ranging from sampling of RF-signals and optical frequency combs to microwave and optical signal synthesis. Integrated versions have the advantage of high reliability, low cost and compact. Here, we desc...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kärtner, Franz X., Callahan, Patrick T., Shtyrkova, Katia, Li, Nanxi, Singh, Neetesh Kumar, Xin, Ming, Ravi, Koustuban, Notaros, Jelena, Magden, Emir Salih, Vermeulen, Diedrik Rene Georgette, Ippen, Erich Peter, Watts, Michael
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129712
Description
Summary:Mode-locked lasers provide extremely low jitter optical pulse trains for a number of applications ranging from sampling of RF-signals and optical frequency combs to microwave and optical signal synthesis. Integrated versions have the advantage of high reliability, low cost and compact. Here, we describe a fully integrated mode-locked laser architecture on a CMOS platform that utilizes rare-earth doped gain media, double-chirped waveguide gratings for dispersion compensation and nonlinear Michelson Interferometers for generating an artificial saturable absorber to implement additive pulse mode locking on chip. First results of devices at 1.9 μm using thulium doped aluminum-oxide glass and operating in the Q-switched mode locking regime are presented.