A review of recent progress in lasers on silicon

The absence of integrated sources of light has always been regarded as a serious obstacle to silicon photonics. The inherent indirect band structure makes silicon a poor emitting material, while epitaxial lasers on Si instead face challenges from the large power loss at the interface. Overcoming these problems is the one indispensable step before the realization of efficient photonic chips, and this perspective gives huge impetus to the development on light sources on silicon. This paper provides a review of recent progress made in 2011 on lasers on silicon.