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

This paper demonstrates the integration of buried-heterostructure (BH) lasers and semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) in a generic photonic foundry platform. The process-flow adaptations necessary for their integration with existing building blocks are presented. BH Fabry-Perot lasers fabricated within the platform are fully characterized and compared with shallow-ridge (SR) lasers already available as a standard building block. SR lasers were fabricated on the same wafer sharing the same layer stack. BH lasers showed a reduction in threshold current of 60% and a reduction in thermal resistance of 40%. The full integration is then validated by the characterization of a compact arrayed waveguide grating laser-based transmitter consisting of eight BH-SOAs and a deep-ridge waveguide. A side-mode suppression ratio of up to 57 dB and a linewidth of 1.5 MHz are achieved.