Octave-spanning supercontinuum generation in a wafer-scale, low loss deuterated silicon nitride waveguide

Broadband light sources are of primary importance for imaging, metrology, and self-referencing applications. Leveraging CMOS-compatible materials with high nonlinearity, low nonlinear loss, and low fabrication cost for achieving supercontinuum generation for broadband light source via nonlinear optics processing is of great merit. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate an octave-spanning supercontinuum generation in an 8-inch wafer-scale deuterated silicon nitride waveguide pumped by 500 fs pulses with an energy of 1700 pJ at a central wavelength of 1555 nm. The deuterated silicon nitride waveguide with a thickness of 800 nm is fabricated using single step deposition at a temperature below 400°C and exhibits a low propagation loss of 0.54 dB/cm. The generated supercontinuum spans from 587 nm to 1883 nm at the -30 dB level. Numerical simulations based on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation show good agreement with the experimental results. We further investigate the spectral coherence and observe a pulse energy dependence. At lower powers, the overall spectral coherence, |g₁₂|, exceeds 0.81 across the measured spectrum. At higher pulse energies, analysis reveals that the degraded coherence may be mitigated through optimization of the waveguide length. The generated supercontinuum spectra provide a promising route for CMOS-compatible light sources for imaging, metrology, and self-referencing applications.