Wafer-scale CMOS foundry silicon-on-insulator devices for integrated temporal pulse compression.

Optical pulses are essential as information carriers, for driving nonlinear light sources, imaging, the study of attosecond science and 3D printing. In many applications, short pulses are needed. For example, the resolution of imaging methods which utilize short pulses is limited by the temporal width of the pulses, as is the capacity of time division multiplexed data. The temporal compression of optical pulses is an important approach to achieving ultrashort pulses. With the widespread proliferation of silicon photonics and their use in a multitude of applications, an integrated, CMOS-compatible approach for pulse compression would allow its seamless integration with other photonic integrated circuits. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate silicon-based pulse compression fabricated in a CMOS foundry. The first technique utilizes two stages, one for generating self-phase modulation through the Kerr nonlinearity in silicon, and the second for temporal synchronization of the new wavelengths. The second technique leverages Bragg soliton-effect temporal compression. We experimentally demonstrate temporal compression of up to 3.6× and good agreement with numerical calculations. This work represents efficient silicon-on-insulator devices for temporal compression realized using a wafer-scale CMOS foundry process and may therefore be mass manufactured and integrated seamlessly with other photonic and electronic circuits.