Thin-film lithium niobate (LN) photonic integrated circuits (PICs) could enable ultrahigh performance in electro-optic and nonlinear optical devices. To date, realizations have been limited to chip-scale proof-of-concepts. Here we demonstrate monolithic LN PICs fabricated on 4- and 6-inch wafers with deep ultraviolet lithography and show smooth and uniform etching, achieving 0.27 dB/cm optical propagation loss on wafer-scale. Our results show that LN PICs are fundamentally scalable and can be highly cost-effective.

Resonator-enhanced electro-optic (RE-EO) frequency comb generators produce broad combs by coupling an optical field to a resonator containing a phase modulator driven at a harmonic of the resonator free spectral range (FSR). Recent advances in integration technologies have opened up the possibility of fabricating low-loss, efficient, and tunable ring-based RE-EO comb generators. In this work, we analyze the properties of a canonical ring-based RE-EO comb generator and propose a new dual-ring comb generator to increase comb conversion efficiency, an especially important characteristic for comb-based optical communications systems. After a brief review of RE-EO comb generator properties in the case of resonant operation, i.e., when the optical frequency and the modulation frequency are harmonics of the resonator FSR, we analyze the effect of input optical phase noise and modulation phase noise on the resulting comb. Additionally, we show analytically that in non-resonant operation the optical frequency offset and the modulation frequency offset can be much larger than the linewidth of the resonator, increasing the tolerance to fabrication errors. Then, we develop and validate numerical models to predict the output spectrum in the presence of dispersive waveguides, which cannot be modeled analytically. Using these accurate models, we analyze a dual-ring RE-EO comb generator that uses a small coupling ring to increase the conversion efficiency to 32%, compared to the 1.3% efficiency of a single-ring RE-EO comb generator. We then analyze a point-to-point inter-data center optical link and determine that a dual-ring RE-EO comb generator can support high-capacity coherent links at 20 Tb/s per fiber.

We fabricate suspended single-mode optical waveguides and ring resonators in 3C silicon carbide (SiC) that operate at telecommunication wavelength, and leverage post-fabrication thermal annealing to minimize optical propagation losses. Annealed optical resonators yield quality factors of over 41,000, which corresponds to a propagation loss of 7 dB/cm, and is a significant improvement over the 24 dB/cm in the case of the non-annealed chip. This improvement is attributed to the enhancement of SiC crystallinity and a significant reduction of waveguide surface roughness, from 2.4 nm to below 1.7 nm. The latter is attributed to surface layer oxide growth during the annealing step. We confirm that the thermo-optic coefficient, an important parameter governing high-power and temperature-dependent performance of SiC, does not vary with annealing and is comparable to that of bulk SiC. Our annealing-based approach, which is especially suitable for suspended structures, offers a straightforward way to realize high-performance 3C-SiC integrated circuits.

Quasi-phasematched interactions in waveguides with quadratic nonlinearities enable highly efficient nonlinear frequency conversion. In this article, we demonstrate the first generation of devices that combine the dispersion-engineering available in nanophotonic waveguides with quasi-phasematched nonlinear interactions available in periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN). This combination enables quasi-static interactions of femtosecond pulses, reducing the pulse energy requirements by several orders of magnitude, from picojoules to femtojoules. We experimentally demonstrate two effects associated with second harmonic generation. First, we observe efficient quasi-phasematched second harmonic generation with <100 fJ of pulse energy. Second, in the limit of strong phase-mismatch, we observe spectral broadening of both harmonics with as little as 2-pJ of pulse energy. These results lay a foundation for a new class of nonlinear devices, in which co-engineering of dispersion with quasi-phasematching enables efficient nonlinear optics at the femtojoule level.

We demonstrate the integration of an amorphous silicon photodetector with a thin film lithium niobate photonic platform operating in the visible wavelength range. We present the details of the design, fabrication, integration, and experimental characterization of this metal-semiconductor-metal photodetector that features a responsivity of 22 mA/W to 37 mA/W over the wide optical bandwidth spanning in the 635 nm–850 nm wavelength range.