There has been a long history of trying to produce lasers on silicon substrates for communications purposes. Unfortunately silicon has an indirect band-gap with makes it unsuitable itself but there have been many attempts and trying to grow lasers from other materials such as InP onto silicon substrates or mounting InP based laser chips directly onto silicon photonic circuits. These approaches can be made to work but they tend to have low yeild and hence are too expensive for mass produced devices.
We have developed a new organic material that can provide population inversion and gain at the important telecommunications wavelength of 1.5 microns. This project will aim to use these materials to build optical amplifiers and lasers on silicon based substrates and characterise their performance.