CMOS-compatible integrated optical hyper-parametric oscillator

Integrated multiple-wavelength laser sources, critical for important applications such as high-precision broadband sensing and spectroscopy(1), molecular fingerprinting(2), optical clocks(3) and attosecond physics(4), have recently been demonstrated in silica and single-crystal microtoroid resonators using parametric gain(2,5,6). However, for applications in telecommunications(7) and optical interconnects(8), analogous devices compatible with a fully integrated platform(9) do not yet exist. Here, we report a fully integrated, CMOS-compatible, multiple-wavelength source. We achieve optical 'hyper-parametric' oscillation in a high-index silica-glass microring resonator(10) with a differential slope efficiency above threshold of 7.4% for a single oscillating mode, a continuous-wave threshold power as low as 54 mW, and a controllable range of frequency spacing from 200 GHz to more than 6 THz. The low loss, design flexibility and CMOS compatibility of this device will enable the creation of multiple-wavelength sources for telecommunications, computing, sensing, metrology and other areas.