Development of low-cost technologies for the fabrication of high-performance telecommunication lasers (DeLight)

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Abstract:

The FP7 ICT project DeLight (www.delightproject.eu) is developing advanced structures and technologies for the low-cost fabrication of high-performance telecommunication lasers. Surface gratings a thousand times smaller than the diameter of human hair are used to generate ultra-pure light, while multiple laser sections provide direct-modulation speeds capable of sending the content of approximately 10 full DVDs per second (43 Gbit/s). The DeLight project removes the need of epitaxial overgrowth, employed in the current fabrication techniques of distributed feedback (DFB) and distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) lasers, by using surface gratings. This fabrication advantage is augmented by the use of Nano-Imprint Lithography (NIL), which is an emerging cost-effective wafer-level lithographic technology based on the mechanical embossing principle, which can achieve pattern resolutions at the atomic scale, beyond the limitations set by the diffraction and scattering for the conventional projection techniques. By exploiting high-order photon-photon resonances DeLight extends the direct-modulation bandwidth far beyond the current limits imposed by electron-photon resonance. This will reduce the cost and complexity of high-speed optical transmitters by eliminating the need of an external modulator. The ultimate goal of DeLight is to provide fast and cheap optical communications by a combination of direct modulation, ultra-high bandwidth and low fabrication costs.