High power >1 W continuous-wave laser in silicon photonics

High power sources are desired in integrated photonics to utilize its full potential for various applications such as in telecom, medical and remote sensing. However, the signal power from the integrated photonics sources have been quite limited. One of the main reasons for that is the usage of small optical mode area waveguides, which although helps in keeping the footprint small and increase the gain efficiency, but limits the energy storage and extraction capability of the signal from an integrated device thus limiting the output power. By increasing the optical mode area, one allows the photons to interact with significantly larger number of gain ions allowing large energy storage and power extraction. In light of that, in this work we show a high-power continuous wave laser based on recently demonstrated large-mode-area gain waveguide which requires no external amplifier. The maximum power generated by the distributed Bragg reflector laser is over 1.35 W (at 1.85 μm) with a slope efficiency >50%.