EPFL develops silicon PICs with new form of light amplification

“Traveling-wave amplifier” can boost optical signals in lidar, sub-sea fiber links, and data centers.

Scientists at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, have developed photonic integrated circuits that demonstrated a new principle of light amplification on a silicon chip. They say can be employed for optical signals like those used in lidar, trans-oceanic fiber amplifiers or in data center telecommunications.

The developers say that the ability to achieve quantum-limited amplification of optical signals contained in optical fibers “is arguably among the most important technological advances that are underlying our modern information society”.

Besides the established approaches to optical amplification – those based on rare-earth ions like erbium, as well as III-V semiconductors – there is another paradigm of optical signal amplification: traveling-wave parametric amplifiers. These achieve signal amplification by varying a small system “parameter”, such as the capacitance or the nonlinearity of a transmission line.