Hybrid integration technologies for semiconductor lasers and optical amplifiers

The exponential increase in the demand for bandwidth requires the development of optoelectronic devices that are both cheap to produce and offer high levels of functionality. It has been shown by many groups that the use of mode expanders on devices such as semiconductor lasers can offer a route to achieving cost reduction by simplifying the coupling of light from the laser to cleaved single mode fibre. An example of our current work using this approach and one that will be described is a hybrid switch that combines two passively aligned high-performance precision cleaved SOA's on silicon carriers with a planar silica on silicon FHD Mach-Zehnder.