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Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a ubiquitous tool to provide precise spatial awareness in various perception environments. A bionic LiDAR that can mimic human-like vision by adaptively gazing at selected regions of interest within a broad field of view is crucial to achieve high-resolution imaging in an energy-saving and cost-effective manner. However, current LiDARs based on stacking fixed-wavelength laser arrays and inertial scanning have not been able to achieve the desired dynamic focusing patterns and agile scalability simultaneously. Moreover, the ability to synchronously acquire multi-dimensional physical parameters, including distance, direction, Doppler, and color, through seamless fusion between multiple sensors, still remains elusive in LiDAR. Here, we overcome these limitations and demonstrate a bio-inspired frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDAR system with dynamic and scalable gazing capability. Our chip-scale LiDAR system is built using hybrid integrated photonic solutions, where a frequency-chirped external cavity laser provides broad spectral tunability, while on-chip electro-optic combs with elastic channel spacing allow customizable imaging granularity. Using the dynamic zoom-in capability and the coherent FMCW scheme, we achieve a state-of-the-art resolution of 0.012 degrees, providing up to 15 times the resolution of conventional 3D LiDAR sensors, with 115 equivalent scanning lines and 4D parallel imaging. We further demonstrate cooperative sensing between our adaptive coherent LiDAR and a camera to enable high-resolution color-enhanced machine vision.

Coherent optics has profoundly impacted diverse applications ranging from communications, LiDAR to quantum computations. However, building coherent systems in integrated photonics previously came at great expense in hardware integration and energy efficiency: the lack of a power-efficient way to generate highly coherent light necessitates bulky lasers and amplifiers, while frequency and phase recovery schemes require huge digital signal processing resources. In this work, we demonstrate a high-coherence parallelization strategy that facilitates advanced integrated coherent systems at a minimum price. Using a self-injection locked microcomb to injection lock a distributed feedback laser array, we boost the microcomb power by a record high gain of up to 60 dB on chip with no degradation in coherence. This strategy enables tens of highly coherent channels with an intrinsic linewidth down to the 10 Hz level and power of more than 20 dBm. The overall electrical to optical wall-plug efficiency reaches 19%, comparable with that of the state-of-the-art semiconductor lasers. Driven by this parallel source, we demonstrate a silicon photonic communication link with an unprecedented data rate beyond 60 Tbit/s. Importantly, the high coherence we achieve reduces the coherent-related DSP consumption by 99.999% compared with the traditional III-V laser pump scheme. This work paves a way to realizing scalable, high-performance coherent integrated photonic systems, potentially benefiting numerous applications.

Silicon modulators are key components in silicon photonics to support the dense integration of electro-optic (EO) functional elements on a compact chip for various applications including high-speed data transmission, signal processing, and photonic computing. Despite numerous advances in promoting the operation speed of silicon modulators, a bandwidth ceiling of 67 GHz emerges in practices and becomes an obstacle to paving silicon photonics toward Tbps level data throughput on a single chip. Here, we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a design strategy for silicon modulators by employing the slow light effect, which shatters the present bandwidth ceiling of silicon modulators and pushes its limit beyond 110 GHz in a small footprint. The proposed silicon modulator is built on a coupled-resonator optical waveguide (CROW) architecture, in which a set of Bragg gratings are appropriately cascaded to give rise to a slow light effect. By comprehensively balancing a series of merits including the group index, photon lifetime, electrical bandwidth, and losses, we found the modulators can benefit from the slow light for better modulation efficiency and compact size while remaining their bandwidth sufficiently high to support ultra-high-speed data transmission. Consequently, we realize a modulator with an EO bandwidth of 110 GHz in a length of 124 {\mu}m, and demonstrate a data rate beyond 110 Gbps by applying simple on-off keying modulation for a DSP-free operation. Our work proves that silicon modulators beyond 110 GHz are feasible, thus shedding light on the potentials of silicon photonics in ultra-high-bandwidth applications such as data communication, optical interconnection, and photonic machine learning.

Microcombs are revolutionizing optoelectronics by providing parallelized, mutually coherent wavelength channels for time-frequency metrology and information processing. To implement this essential function in integrated photonic systems, it is desirable to drive microcombs directly with an on-chip laser in a simple and flexible way. However, two major difficulties are preventing this goal: 1) generating mode-locked comb states usually requires a significant amount of pump power and 2) the requirement to align laser and resonator frequency significantly complicates operation and limits the tunability of the comb lines. Here, we address these problems by using microresonators on an AlGaAs on-insulator platform to generate dark-pulse microcombs. This highly nonlinear platform dramatically relaxes fabrication requirements and leads to a record-low pump power of less than 1 mW for coherent comb generation. Dark-pulse microcombs facilitated by thermally-controlled avoided mode-crossings are accessed by direct DFB laser pumping. Without any feedback or control circuitries, the comb shows good coherence and stability. This approach also leads to an unprecedented wide chirping range of all the comb lines. Our work provides a route to realize power-efficient, simple and reconfigurable microcombs that can be seamlessly integrated with a wide range of photonic systems.

Microcombs have sparked a surge of applications over the last decade, ranging from optical communications to metrology. Despite their diverse deployment, most microcomb-based systems rely on a tremendous amount of bulk equipment to fulfill their desired functions, which is rather complicated, expensive and power-consuming. On the other hand, foundry-based silicon photonics (SiPh) has had remarkable success in providing versatile functionality in a scalable and low-cost manner, but its available chip-based light sources lack the capacity for parallelization, which limits the scope of SiPh applications. Here, we bridge these two technologies by using a power-efficient and operationally-simple AlGaAs on insulator microcomb source to drive CMOS SiPh engines. We present two important chip-scale photonic systems for optical data transmissions and microwave photonics respectively: The first microcomb-based integrated photonic data link is demonstrated, based on a pulse-amplitude 4-level modulation scheme with 2 Tbps aggregate rate, and a highly reconfigurable microwave photonic filter with unprecedented integration level is constructed, using a time stretch scheme. Such synergy of microcomb and SiPh integrated components is an essential step towards the next generation of fully integrated photonic systems., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures