A photonic integrated circuit-based erbium-doped amplifier.

Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers revolutionized long-haul optical communications and laser technology. Erbium ions could provide a basis for efficient optical amplification in photonic integrated circuits but their use remains impractical as a result of insufficient output power. We demonstrate a photonic integrated circuit-based erbium amplifier reaching 145 milliwatts of output power and more than 30 decibels of small-signal gain-on par with commercial fiber amplifiers and surpassing state-of-the-art III-V heterogeneously integrated semiconductor amplifiers. We apply ion implantation to ultralow-loss silicon nitride (Si