Photonic integrated circuits - a new approach to laser technology

In this work a brief review on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) is presented with a specific focus on integrated lasers and amplifiers. The work presents the history of development of the integration technology in photonics and its comparison to microelectronics. The major part of the review is focused on InP-based photonic integrated circuits, with a short description of the potential of the silicon technology. A completely new way of fabrication of PICs, called generic integration technology, is presented and discussed. The basic assumption of this approach is the very same as in the case of electronic circuits and states that a limited set of standard components, both active and passive, enables designing of a complex, multifunctional PIC of every type. As a result, functionally advanced, compact, energy efficient and cost-optimized photonic devices can be fabricated. The work presents also selected examples of active PICs like multi-wavelength laser sources, discretely tunable lasers, WDM transmitters, ring lasers etc.