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Photonic integrated endlessly self-injection locked laser assembled in a fiber-coupled standard butterfly package. 2026 EPFL/Simone Bianconi - CC-BY-SA 4.0

A laser that stays locked without active control

— EPFL researchers have developed a chip-based laser that keeps a very stable frequency across its tested operating range, without needing active electronic control.

Placed on a 1 CHF coin for scale, EPFL's photonic chip shows how a laser architecture once confined to table-top systems can be shrunk to the millimeter scale. ©2026 EPFL/Zheru Qiu

A ultrafast laser on a chip

— EPFL researchers have built a photonic chip that rivals much larger laboratory lasers, delivers extremely short, high-energy optical pulses, and could reshape technologies like medical diagnostics and optical atomic clocks.

Volume-manufactured, erbium-doped, high-power tunable waveguide lasers. Credit: Yang Liu, Tobias Kippenberg © 2026 EPFL

Wafer-scale lasers bring fiber performance to photonic chips

— Researchers at EPFL have developed the first wafer-scale, foundry-compatible erbium-doped integrated lasers, combining industrial manufacturability with performance approaching that of state-of-the-art erbium‑doped fiber lasers.

Photograph of a manufactured 100-mm wafer hosting hundreds of copper Damascene lithium tantalate modulators. Credit: Lin et al 2026.

Copper damascene process brings electronics and photonics together

— EPFL researchers have, for the first time, applied the semiconductor industry’s standard copper wiring process to ferroelectric thin film photonics. By building lithium tantalate modulators with copper instead of gold, they remove a major barrier to 3D integration with advanced CMOS electronics and move optical interconnects closer to large scale deployment in data centers and AI clusters.

A silicon wafer. Credit: EPFL Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum

Removing copper impurities improves photonic integrated circuits

— EPFL researchers identify copper impurities as the hidden barrier in silicon nitride photonic chips, paving the way for reliable, real-world applications of soliton microcombs.

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