Fudan manufactures the world’s first all-silicon laser pointer laser. Promote the development of the all-silicon laser industry. Recently, the team of Professor Wu Xiang, Professor Lu Ming and Associate Professor Zhang Shuyu from the School of Information Science and Engineering of Fudan University successfully developed the world’s first all-silicon laser. Different from the previous hybrid silicon-based lasers, this research finally realized the laser generation from silicon itself as the gain medium.
This research is a major breakthrough in the field of integrated silicon optoelectronics in the past 30 years. Integrated silicon optoelectronics combines the best of today’s two pillar industries-the microelectronics industry and the optoelectronics industry. Silicon laser is the basic element of integrated silicon optoelectronic chip, and it is the key to realize integrated silicon optoelectronics. Integrated silicon optoelectronics is expected to be widely used in many fields such as remote data communication, sensing, lighting, display, imaging, inspection, big data and so on.
However, silicon itself emits extremely weak light, and how to process silicon into a laser material with high gain has always been a bottleneck. Since the experiments in 2000 demonstrated that silicon nanocrystalline materials can achieve optical amplification, this bottleneck has always restricted the development of silicon lasers. As early as 2005 when all-silicon laser pointers lasers came out, news about “all-silicon lasers” had attracted social attention. However, this is a laser generated by introducing an external laser into a silicon chip, and silicon itself is not used as a light source.