Foundry's Perspective on Laser and SOA Module Integration with Silicon Photonics

Silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) builds on the demand for a low cost PIC approach from established silicon-based manufacturing infrastructure traditionally built for electronics. Besides its natural abundance, silicon has desirable properties such as optically low loss (at certain critical wavelengths), and small form factor to enable high density scaled-up optical on-chip circuitry. However, given that silicon is an indirect bandgap material, the platform is typically integrated with other direct bandgap (e.g., III-V semiconductor) platforms for on-chip light source. An effective solution to integrating light source onto silicon photonics platform is integral to a practical scaled-up and full-fledged integrated photonics implementation. Here, we discuss the integration solutions, and present our foundry's perspective toward realizing it.