Micro-Transfer-Printed Membrane Distributed Reflector Lasers on Si Waveguide Modulated With 50-Gbit/s NRZ Signal

In this work, we fabricate directly modulated membrane distributed reflector (DR) lasers on a Si waveguide by utilizing micro-transfer printing method. Micro-transfer printing enables low-loss coupling between the lasers and the silicon photonics circuit, and since it is a back-end process, we can test the lasers prior to integration. A membrane laser is as thick as the Si waveguides, which makes optical coupling between the two quite easy. In addition, membrane lasers with a lateral p-i-n diode structure have low capacitance and a large optical confinement factor, which means they can achieve a low threshold current and high-speed modulation operation with low energy consumption. The fabricated membrane DR laser integrated with a 220-nm-thick Si waveguide exhibits a low threshold current of 1.2 mA and single-mode operation at 1535 nm with a side-mode suppression ratio (SMSR) of about 40 dB at the bias current of 14 mA. It also achieves the E-O bandwidth of over 25 GHz and 50-Gbit/s non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signal modulation with an extinction ratio of 2.5 dB.