As photonic integrated circuits (PICs) mature, they are finding their way into an increasing number of complex and compact optical systems beyond traditional telecom and datacom applications. These include applications in lidar, biophotonics, chemical detection, microwave photonics, and quantum sensing/computing. Many of these applications involve wavelengths outside the traditional telecom/datacom bands, which have historically been the focus of most R&D investment. Fortunately, research in such areas, particularly in the ultraviolet (UV), visible, and mid-wave infrared (MWIR) wavelength regions, is increasing and available technology is maturing rapidly. This talk will provide an overview of relevant applications and then describe the performance requirements, recent component and fabrication advancements, including those happening at MIT Lincoln laboratory, and desired architectures for integrated photonics across the wavelength spectrum.

While the ecosystem for silicon photonics has been making great strides recently, including many new foundry offerings, design verification capability and PDK support, accurate circuit modeling of photonic components capable of joint simulation with driving electronics has been lagging, and customers are often left to develop their own models. In particular, the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) requires the simulation to capture the effect of at least several neighboring channels if not the entire spectrum in order to accurately predict the optical crosstalk and nonlinear effects such as cross-modulation. However, straightforward simulation at either optical frequencies or downconverting the optical spectrum to a x100GHz-THz range is computationally prohibitive, especially if the goal is to simulate photonics with potentially large electrical interface circuitry such as modulator driver or a TIA. This presentation lays out the case for an acute need for support for DWDM-aware modeling and simulation capability by foundries/PDK developes and EDA vendors, as well as a proposal of one method to provide such support. It first motivates the need to accurately capture the effect of neighboring DWDM channels to the victim channel (optical crosstalk) by demonstrating the importance and the role of this crosstalk at the link level. Then it shows the necessity for combining multiple wavelengths with user-selectable channel spacing in a single simulation in order to provide accuracy and efficiency of the design process and eliminate many cumbersome and error-prone simulation steps and approximations. Finally, it describes one simple way to achieve this goal that preserves computational efficiency and compatibility with industry-standard Spectre and SPICE tools, which is based on Verilog-A, and which treats optical signal at each wavelenght as a separate baseband signal, allowing any nonlinearity and/or wavelength-dependent behavior to be explicitly coded in the model. It also lends itself well to modeling other important effects such as high optical power effects, reflections and polarization dependent behavior.

Integrated photonics has profoundly affected a wide range of technologies. The ability to fabricate a complete optical system on a chip offers unrivalled scalability, weight, cost and power efficiency. Over the last decade, the progression from pure III–V materials platforms to silicon photonics has significantly broadened the scope of integrated photonics, and yet further by combining integrated lasers with the high-volume, advanced fabrication capabilities of the commercial electronics industry. Yet, despite remarkable manufacturing advantages, reliance on silicon-based waveguides currently limits the spectral window available to photonic integrated circuits (PICs). New generation of integrated photonics is needed to address broadband operation for emerging applications.

Many applications of integrated photonics in areas such as quantum information science, metrology, and sensing require access to light sources at wavelengths outside of the telecommunications bands. In this talk, I will describe how we utilize nonlinear optical processes in the silicon nitride photonic platform to generate light across any one of a broad range of wavelengths, from the visible to the near-infrared. Both quantum and classical light sources and frequency conversion will be discussed.

The CW-WDM multi-source agreement is introduced and reviewed. The CW-WDM MSA is a new standard focused on defining a set of wavelength grids, power levels, and use conditions for emerging photonics applications such as optical IO, optical computing, AI, and HPC.

Lasers are a key element to most integrated photonic circuits and are included in a variety of ways, from completely off-chip to highly integrated. I’ll discuss the basic concepts of semiconductor lasers, their use in integrated photonics, and the most critical challenges they face for this application. I’ll then review how the different building blocks can be simulated and optimized, at a physical level, for a given laser design. Finally, I’ll discuss various methods, with examples, of simulating the entire laser, from full physical simulation to reduced order models that can be included in larger scale circuit and system simulations.