The term laser is an acronym for Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

The stimulated emission is created by changing the state of electrons the subatomic particles that make up electricity. As their state changes, they release a photon, which is the particle that composes light. This generation of photons can be stimulated in many materials, but not silicon due to its material properties. However, an alternate process called the Raman effect can be used to amplify light in silicon and other materials, such as glass fiber.

HYBRID SILICON LASER

A hybrid silicon laser is a semiconductor laser fabricated from both silicon and group IIIV semiconductor materials. The hybrid silicon laser was developed to address the lack of a silicon laser to enable fabrication of low-cost, mass-producible silicon optical devices. The hybrid approach takes advantage of the light-emitting properties of III-V semiconductor materials combined with the process maturity of silicon to fabricate electrically driven lasers on a silicon wafer that can be integrated with other silicon photonic devices. PHYSICS A hybrid silicon laser is an optical source that is fabricated from both silicon and group III-V semiconductor materials (e.g. Indium(III) phosphide, Gallium(III) arsenide). It comprises a silicon waveguide fused to an active, light-emitting, III-V epitaxial semiconductor wafer. The III-V epitaxial wafer is designed with different layers such that the active layer can emit light when it is excited either by shining light, e.g. a laser onto it; or by passing electricity through it. The emitted light from the active layer couples into the silicon waveguide due to their close proximity (<130 nm separation) where it can be guided to reflect off mirrors at the end of the silicon waveguide to form the laser cavity. FABRICATION The hybrid silicon laser is fabricated by a technique called plasma assisted wafer bonding. Silicon waveguides are first fabricated on a silicon on insulator (SOI) wafer. This SOI wafer and the un-patterned III-V wafer are then exposed to an oxygen plasma before being pressed together at a low (for semiconductor manufacturing) temperature of 300C for 12hours. This process fuses the two wafers together. The III-V wafer is then etched into mesas to expose electrical layers in the epitaxial structure. Metal contacts are fabricated on these contact layers allowing electrical current to flow to the active region. USES

Silicon manufacturing and fabrication is widely used in the electronic industry to massproduce low-cost electronic devices. Silicon photonics uses these same electronic manufacturing technologies to make low cost integrated optical devices. One issue with using silicon for an

optical device is that silicon is a poor light emitter and cannot be used to make an electrically pumped laser. This means that lasers have first to be fabricated on a separate III-V semiconductor wafer before being individually aligned to each silicon device, in a process that is both costly and time-consuming, limiting the total number of lasers that can be used on a silicon photonic circuit. By using this wafer bonding technique many hybrid silicon lasers can be fabricated simultaneously on a silicon wafer, all aligned to the silicon photonic devices. Potential uses cited in the references below include fabricating many, possibly hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers on a die and using silicon photonics to combine them together to form high bandwidth optical links for personal computers, servers or back planes.

EXTERNAL CAVITY LASER

It is based on an external-cavity configuration with simultaneous feedback and intracavity spatial separation of the lasers spectral components. The electronical tunability is achieved by insertion of a liquid-crystal array as an electronically controlled aperture into the region of spatial separation of the spectral components. Wavelength tunability without mechanical movement over a range of 10 nm and two-color operation are demonstrated with a 670-nm laser diode. Wavelength-tunable laser diodes have numerous applications in metrology and spectroscopy. Many attempts have been made to fabricate realize monolithic devices with spectral tunability; the C3 laser,1 tunable twin guide lasers,2 Y lasers,3 and tunable distributed feedback lasers4 have been produced. However, none of them can compete with external-cavity arrangements in terms of tuning range and narrow linewidths, both of which are crucial for spectroscopy. Therefore external-cavity configurations are usually used for those applications. The most successful realizations of external-cavity laser diodes are the Littman5 and the Littrow6 configurations. In both cases the external cavity contains a diffraction grating that provides wavelength-selective feedback. Wavelength tuning is achieved by mechanical tilting of either the diffraction grating or a tuning mirror. Littman and Littrow lasers are commercially available and widely used but suffer from important problems and limitations: First, wavelength tuning implies mechanical movement, which leads to wear and fundamentally restricts the tuning rate to the subkilohertz range. Second, feedback is given only for one wavelength, so multicolor synchronous operation is intrinsically impossible. Recently, a different external-cavity concept was used by Shi et al. that allows for synchronous multiwavelength operation of a picosecond diode laser for wavelengthdivision multiplexing applications.7 The configuration of electronically tunable external-cavity laser diode (ETECAL) is shown in Fig. 1. The external cavity consists of an antiref lection-coated (AR) commercial 670-nm laser diode (LD), a collimator, a diffraction grating (2000 grooves_mm), an f _ 17.5 cm lens, a liquidcrystal array (LCA), and a high-ref lection end mirror. The output beam of the laser diode is collimated and sent onto the diffraction grating. The grating is placed such that its first diffraction order is directed toward the lens and that the distance between grating and lens equals the focal length of the lens. The high-ref lection mirror is placed in the other focal plane of the lens, and the LCA is located directly in front of the mirror. The basic advantage of this cavity geometry is that without the LCA it provides simultaneous feedback for all spectral components of the laser diode while the spectral components are spatially separated in the cavity. This spatial separation enables us to introduce the LCA as an electronically

controllable aperture to select feedback for the various spectral components, which can be independently switched on and off. This configuration permits both tuning of the emission wavelength and operation of the laser at various wavelengths simultaneously. First we study the wavelength tunability. We achieve wavelength tuning by making successive areas of the LCA transparent. Figure 2 shows a set of emission spectra with emission wavelengths between 665 and 676 nm. Our total tuning range is slightly less than that of commercial mechanically tuned systems because our cavity contains more optical components and thus suffers slightly higher losses. The tuning rate in our case is limited by the speed of the LCA in the kilohertz range. But we stress that this is no intrinsic limit. Switching rates in the megahertz range can be obtained when faster electronically controlled apertures such as semiconductor electroabsorption modulators8 are used. The linewidth of our laser was measured with a FabryPerot interferometer to be smaller than 30 MHz (i.e., the resolution of the interferometer) with a sidemode suppression of better than 10 dB. Second, the possibility of multicolor synchronous operation is one of the great advantages of the ETECAL. Figure 3 shows three emission spectra with the LCA set to be transparent for two wavelengths. Dual emission is obtained at various spectral positions and with variable spacing between the emission modes. We confirmed that the laser operates at both wavelengths simultaneously by a combination of linewidth and timeresolved emission measurements: A broadening of the linewidth above 30 MHz would be expected if the laser were switching between the two modes on a time scale faster than approximately _30 MHz_21 _ 30 ns. This broadening was not observed during dual-mode emission. In addition, our time-resolved emission measurements showed no indication of switching between the modes on a time scale slower than 10 ns. We thus conclude that we have achieved real (simultaneous) dual-mode emission, which is attractive for many applications, such as pumpprobe spectroscopy and difference-frequency generation in the terahertz regime. Finally, we point out that the LCA also allows us to vary the losses at each position so there is no principal restriction for two-color and even multicolor operation. In conclusion, we have suggested and realized a new concept for a purely electrically tunable external cavity laser-diode. The configuration contains no mechanically movable parts.

Fig. 1. Schematic depiction of the ETECAL setup.

Fig. 2. Spectra of ETECAL emission for several settings of the LCA. The traces have been vertically offset.

Fig. 3. Three emission spectra of the ETECAL with dual color operation.

CONTINUOUS SILICON LASER

Continuous Silicon Laser is based on Raman Effect. Usually, silicon is transparent to infrared light, meaning atoms do not absorb photons as they pass through the silicon because the infrared light does not have enough energy to excite an electron. Occasionally, however, two photons arrive at the atom at the same time in such a way that the combined energy is enough to free an electron from an atom. Usually, this is a very rare occurrence. However, the higher the pump power, the more likely it is to happen. Eventually, these free electrons recombine with the crystal lattice and pose no further problem. However, at high power densities, the rate at which the free electrons are created exceeds the rate of recombination and they build up in the waveguide. Unfortunately, these free electrons begin absorbing the light passing through the silicon waveguide and diminish the power of these signals. The end result is a loss significant enough to cancel out the benefit of Raman amplification. The solution is to change the design of the waveguide so that it contains a semiconductor structure, technically called a PIN (P-type Intrinsic N-type) device. When a voltage is applied to this device, it acts like a vacuum and removes the electrons from the path of the light. Prior to this breakthrough, the two photon absorption problem would draw away so many photons as to not allow net amplification. Hence, maintaining a continuous laser beam would be impossible. Intels breakthrough is the use of the PIN to make the amplification continuous. Figure 3 is a schematic of the PIN device. The PIN is represented by the p- and n- doped regions as well as the intrinsic (undoped) silicon in between. This silicon device can direct the flow of current in much the same way as diodes and other semiconductor devices do today in common electronics. Hence, the manufacture of this device relies on established manufacturing technologies and it reinforces the basic goal of silicon photonics: inexpensive, high-performance optical components. To create the breakthrough laser, Intel coated the ends of the PIN waveguide with mirrors to form a laser cavity (Figure 4). After applying a voltage and a pump beam to the silicon, researchers observed a steady beam of laser light of a different wavelength exiting the cavity the first continuous silicon laser.

CONCLUSION
As Moores Law continues to push microprocessor performance, and as increasing volumes of data are sent across the Internet, the demands placed on network infrastructure will increase significantly. Optical communications and silicon photonic technology will allow enterprises to scale bandwidth availability to meet this demand. In addition, due to the low cost of silicon solutions, servers and high-end PCs might one day come standard with an optical port for high-bandwidth communication. Likewise, other devices will be able to share in the bandwidth explosion provided by the optical building blocks of silicon photonics. By creating the PIN device to sweep away free electrons in silicon waveguides, Intel delivered a significant breakthrough: a silicon component that can create continuous-beam Raman lasers and optical amplifiers. Intels research into silicon photonics is an end-to-end program that pushes Moores Law into new areas. It brings the benefits of CMOS and Intels volume manufacturing expertise to fiber-optic communications. The goal is not only achieving high performance in silicon photonics, but doing so at a price point that makes the technology a natural fit even an automatic feature for all devices that consume bandwidth. Intels breakthrough continuous silicon Raman laser will undoubtedly contribute to the reality of this vision.