Heterogeneous integration of optical integrated components promises to bridge the gap in functionality of different material platforms currently in use. For example, high performance gain materials such as indium phosphide can now be integrated with reliable silicon photonic circuits to create sophisticated tunable light sources. We propose a multi-chip heterogeneous integration platform using edge coupling to couple light in-between chips and evanescent coupling to couple light to optical fibers. The proposed optoelectronic packaging scheme enables applications for low power, large bandwidth optical communication sources, nonlinear optical integrated circuits, phase arrays for beam steering, and many more. We demonstrate a large channel count WDM source using an array of distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) lasers combined with a silicon photonics wavelength multiplexer. We also propose a low loss optical coupling method for very large scale optical switches.
Project end date: 12/21/2020