The first commercially scalable integrated laser and microcomb on a single chip

Fifteen years ago, UC Santa Barbara electrical and materials professor John Bowers pioneered a method for integrating a laser onto a silicon wafer. The technology has since been widely deployed in combination with other silicon photonics devices to replace the copper-wire interconnects that formerly linked servers at data centers, dramatically increasing energy efficiency--an important endeavor at a time when data traffic is growing by roughly 25% per year.