Using standard silicon manufacturing processes, researchers from UC Santa Barbara and Intel Corp. have built the world’s first electrically powered hybrid silicon laser, university and Intel officials announced last week. This breakthrough addresses one of the last major barriers to producing low-cost, high-bandwidth silicon photonics devices for use in future computers and data centers.

The light-emitting properties of indium phosphide were combined with the light-routing capabilities of silicon into a single hybrid chip. When voltage is applied, light generated in the indium element enters the silicon waveguide to create a continuous laser beam that can be used to drive other silicon photonic devices.

A laser built on silicon could drive wider use of super-fast photonics devices because using high-volume silicon manufacturing techniques would greatly reduce costs.

While widely used in digital electronics today, silicon can route, detect, modulate, and even amplify light, but does not effectively generate light. In contrast, indium phosphide-based lasers are commonly used today in telecommunications equipment. But the need to individually assemble and align them has made them too expensive to build for the personal computer industry.

“Our research program with Intel highlights how industry and academia can work together to advance the state of science and technology,” said John Bowers, professor of electrical and computer engineering. “By combining UCSB’s expertise with indium phosphide and Intel’s silicon photonics expertise, we have demonstrated a novel laser structure based on a bonding method that can be used at the wafer-, partial-wafer or die-level, and could be a solution for large-scale optical integration onto a silicon platform,” added the director of UCSB’s Multidisciplinary Optical Switching Technology Center.

This could open “a new era of high-performance computing applications,” said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab. “While still far from becoming a commercial product, we believe dozens, even hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers could be integrated with other components onto a single silicon chip.”

Jagdeep Shah, program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), said, “Getting an electrically pumped laser source on silicon using fabrication process compatible with high volume manufacturing is a critical step forward.” DARPA helped fund this research.