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<p>Integrated photonics has undergone tremendous development in the past few decades. Loss and gain are two fundamental parameters in photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and have direct impacts on nearly all key performance metrics. Surprisingly, the tools to characterize the optical loss and gain inside PICs are very limited. This is because, unlike free-space or fibre optics, integrated circuits cannot be non-destructively disassembled. Here we report a universal method to see inside the PICs and measure loss and gain on the component level non-destructively. The method leverages nonlinear optical devices as optical power discriminators to retrieve the loss and gain information. Our method has a precision better than 0.1 dB and can characterize the loss of individual fibre–chip coupling facets as well as general unknown devices under test. As an application, we measured the true on-chip quantum efficiency of a quantum PIC consisting of heterogeneously integrated balanced photodiodes, a critical building block for integrated quantum technology. Our non-destructive and highly precise method can be implemented on different photonic platforms to understand gain and loss in complex photonic circuits, which is essential to optimize circuit design and to create large-scale systems with predictable, reproducible performance.</p>

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Universal loss and gain characterization inside photonic integrated circuits

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年2月3日

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  • Haoran Chen,
  • Ruxuan Liu,
  • Gedalia Y. Koehler,
  • Fatemehsadat Tabatabaei,
  • Xiangwen Guo,
  • Shuman Sun,
  • Zijiao Yang,
  • Beichen Wang,
  • Andreas Beling,
  • Xu Yi

摘要

Integrated photonics has undergone tremendous development in the past few decades. Loss and gain are two fundamental parameters in photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and have direct impacts on nearly all key performance metrics. Surprisingly, the tools to characterize the optical loss and gain inside PICs are very limited. This is because, unlike free-space or fibre optics, integrated circuits cannot be non-destructively disassembled. Here we report a universal method to see inside the PICs and measure loss and gain on the component level non-destructively. The method leverages nonlinear optical devices as optical power discriminators to retrieve the loss and gain information. Our method has a precision better than 0.1 dB and can characterize the loss of individual fibre–chip coupling facets as well as general unknown devices under test. As an application, we measured the true on-chip quantum efficiency of a quantum PIC consisting of heterogeneously integrated balanced photodiodes, a critical building block for integrated quantum technology. Our non-destructive and highly precise method can be implemented on different photonic platforms to understand gain and loss in complex photonic circuits, which is essential to optimize circuit design and to create large-scale systems with predictable, reproducible performance.