Microcomb-driven silicon photonic systems

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…

• UO
  University of California, Santa Barbara