Monolithic Integration of Buried-Heterostructures in a Generic Integrated Photonic Foundry Process

This work demonstrates the integration of buriedheterostructure (BH) lasers and optical amplifiers (SOAs) in a generic photonic platform. The process-flow necessary for their integration is presented. BH Fabry-Perot lasers fabricated within the platform are fully characterized and compared with shallowridge (SR) lasers already available as a standard building block and are fabricated on the same wafer sharing the same layer stack. BH lasers showed a reduction in threshold current of 50% and thermal resistance of 40%. The full integration is then validated by the characterization of a compact arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) laser based transmitter consisting of 8 BH-SOAs and a deep-ridge waveguide. A side-mode suppression ratio (SMSR) of 57 dB and a linewidth of 1.5 MHz is achieved.