Silicon Raman Amplifiers, Lasers, and Their Applications

Silicon Photonics is emerging as an attractive technology in order to realize low cost, high density integrated optical circuits. Realizing active functionalities in Silicon waveguiding structures is being pursued rigorously. In particular, the Stimulated Raman scattering process has attracted considerably attention for achieving on-chip light generation, amplification and wavelength conversion. This paper reviews some of the recent efforts in using the Raman nonlinear process to realize amplifiers, and lasers. First the prospects of Raman process in realizing high gain amplifiers are discussed theoretically. Following this experimental results on amplification with gains as high as 20dB are presented. Some of the recent results in realizing pulsed and CW lasers with reverse-biased carrier sweep out are presented. The paper is concluded by highlighting some of the applications of the Raman process in Silicon in realizing mid-IR sources and also the use of SiGe as a flexible Raman medium are discussed.