A Low-Fabrication-Temperature Erbium-Based Waveguide Amplifier

In recent years, with the continuous development of silicon photonics technology, more and more optoelectronic devices have integrated into silicon- base platform. However, the inter-device transmission and coupling loss is serious, which results in an urgent need for on-chip waveguide amplifiers to compensate for the loss. Erbium silicate is an ideal gain material because of its extremely high Er3+ concentration (1022 cm(-3)). Nevertheless, Erbium silicate must be annealed above 1000 degrees C to activate the Er3+, which would damage other on-chip optoelectronic components. To solve this problem, here, we report a low-fabrication-temperature erbium-based waveguide amplifier. Erbium-ytterbium silicate and Bi2O3 mixed film is used as gain material, which can activate the Er3+ at 600 degrees C annealing condition. The waveguide amplifier was fabricated by lift-off process due to that the mixed film is hard to etch. Finally, 2 dB signal enhancement has been observed at 1550nm. This work shows that the proposed material has great potential for on-chip waveguide amplifier.