Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Article
  • Published:

Scalable feedback stabilization of quantum light sources on a CMOS chip

Nature Electronics volume 8, pages 620–630 (2025)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Silicon photonics could soon be used to create the vast numbers of physical qubits needed to achieve useful quantum information processing by leveraging mature complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) manufacturing to miniaturize optical devices for generating and manipulating quantum states of light. However, the development of practical silicon quantum-photonic integrated circuits faces challenges related to high sensitivity to process and temperature variations, free-carrier and self-heating nonlinearities, and thermal crosstalk. These issues have been partially addressed with bulky off-chip electronics, but this sacrifices many benefits of a chip-scale platform. Here we report an electronic–photonic quantum system-on-chip that consists of quantum-correlated photon-pair sources stabilized via on-chip feedback control circuits and is fabricated in a commercial 45-nm CMOS microelectronics foundry. We use non-invasive photocurrent sensing in a tunable microring cavity photon-pair source to actively lock it to a fixed-wavelength pump laser while operating in the quantum regime, enabling large-scale microring-based quantum systems. We also show that these sources maintain stable quantum properties and operate reliably in a practical setting with many adjacent photon-pair sources creating thermal disturbances on the same chip. Such dense integration of electronics and photonics enables implementation and control of quantum-photonic systems at the scale needed to achieve useful quantum information processing with CMOS-fabricated chips.

Access through your institution
Buy or subscribe

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Access through your institution

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Electronic–photonic quantum system-on-chip.
Fig. 2: Classical characterization of the electronic–photonic integrated circuit block.
Fig. 3: Quantum characterization of the SFWM photon-pair source with real-time feedback control.
Fig. 4: Experimental demonstration of feedback-controlled SFWM under thermal disturbances.
Fig. 5: Simultaneous operation of many photon-pair sources on a single chip.

Similar content being viewed by others

Data availability

Datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

References

  1. Rudolph, T. Why I am optimistic about the silicon-photonic route to quantum computing. APL Photon. 2, 030901 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Wang, J., Sciarrino, F., Laing, A. & Thompson, M. G. Integrated photonic quantum technologies. Nat. Photon. 14, 273–284 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Adcock, J. C. et al. Advances in silicon quantum photonics. IEEE J. Sel. Topics Quantum Electron. 27, 1–24 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Giewont, K. et al. 300-mm monolithic silicon photonics foundry technology. IEEE J. Sel. Topics Quantum Electron. 25, 8200611 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Rakowski, M. et al. 45nm CMOS-silicon photonics monolithic technology (45CLO) for next-generation, low power and high speed optical interconnects. In Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2020, OSA Technical Digest T3H.3 (Optica Publishing Group, 2020).

  6. Sharping, J. E. et al. Generation of correlated photons in nanoscale silicon waveguides. Opt. Express 14, 12388–12393 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Harada, K.-i et al. Generation of high-purity entangled photon pairs using silicon wire waveguide. Opt. Express 16, 20368–20373 (2008).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Clemmen, S. et al. Continuous wave photon pair generation in silicon-on-insulator waveguides and ring resonators. Opt. Express 17, 16558–16570 (2009).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. PsiQuantum team. A manufacturable platform for photonic quantum computing. Nature 641, 876–883 (2025).

  10. Bian, Y. et al. 3D integrated laser attach technology on a 300-mm monolithic CMOS silicon photonics platform. IEEE J. Sel. Topics Quantum Electron. 29, 8200519 (2023).

    Google Scholar 

  11. Mahmudlu, H. et al. Fully on-chip photonic turnkey quantum source for entangled qubit/qudit state generation. Nat. Photon. 17, 518–524 (2023).

  12. Kim, J.-H. et al. Hybrid integration of solid-state quantum emitters on a silicon photonic chip. Nano Lett. 17, 7394–7400 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Katsumi, R. et al. Quantum-dot single-photon source on a CMOS silicon photonic chip integrated using transfer printing. APL Photon. 4, 036105 (2019).

  14. Larocque, H. et al. Tunable quantum emitters on large-scale foundry silicon photonics. Nat. Commun. 15, 5781 (2024).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Eltes, F. et al. A BaTiO3-based electro-optic Pockels modulator monolithically integrated on an advanced silicon photonics platform. J. Lightwave Technol. 37, 1456–1462 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Eltes, F. et al. An integrated optical modulator operating at cryogenic temperatures. Nat. Mater. 19, 1164–1168 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Wang, X., Valdez, F., Mere, V. & Mookherjea, S. Monolithic integration of 110 GHz thin-film lithium niobate modulator and high-Q silicon microring resonator for photon-pair generation. In 2022 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) 1–2 (IEEE, 2022).

  18. Wang, X., Mere, V., Valdez, F. & Mookherjea, S. Integrated electro-optic control of biphoton generation using hybrid photonics. Opt. Quantum 1, 19–25 (2023).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Pernice, W. H. et al. High-speed and high-efficiency travelling wave single-photon detectors embedded in nanophotonic circuits. Nat. Commun. 3, 1325 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Akhlaghi, M. K., Schelew, E. & Young, J. F. Waveguide integrated superconducting single-photon detectors implemented as near-perfect absorbers of coherent radiation. Nat. Commun. 6, 8233 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Najafi, F. et al. On-chip detection of non-classical light by scalable integration of single-photon detectors. Nat. Commun. 6, 5873 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Carolan, J. et al. Scalable feedback control of single photon sources for photonic quantum technologies. Optica 6, 335–340 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Caspani, L. et al. Integrated sources of photon quantum states based on nonlinear optics. Light Sci. Appl. 6, e17100 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Savanier, M., Kumar, R. & Mookherjea, S. Photon pair generation from compact silicon microring resonators using microwatt-level pump powers. Opt. Express 24, 3313–3328 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Silverstone, J. W. et al. Qubit entanglement between ring-resonator photon-pair sources on a silicon chip. Nat. Commun. 6, 7948 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Faruque, I. I., Sinclair, G. F., Bonneau, D., Rarity, J. G. & Thompson, M. G. On-chip quantum interference with heralded photons from two independent micro-ring resonator sources in silicon photonics. Opt. Express 26, 20379–20395 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Lu, L. et al. Three-dimensional entanglement on a silicon chip. npj Quantum Inf. 6, 30 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Llewellyn, D. et al. Chip-to-chip quantum teleportation and multi-photon entanglement in silicon. Nat. Phys. 16, 148–153 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Arrazola, J. M. et al. Quantum circuits with many photons on a programmable nanophotonic chip. Nature 591, 54–60 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Wang, J. et al. Multidimensional quantum entanglement with large-scale integrated optics. Science 360, 285–291 (2018).

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  31. Bao, J. et al. Very-large-scale integrated quantum graph photonics. Nat. Photon. 17, 573–581 (2023).

  32. Yard, P. et al. On-chip quantum information processing with distinguishable photons. Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 150602 (2024).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Horikawa, T. et al. Resonant wavelength variation modelling for microring resonators based on fabrication deviation analysis. In 2017 European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) 1–3 (IEEE, 2017).

  34. Jayatilleka, H. et al. Post-fabrication trimming of silicon photonic ring resonators at wafer-scale. J. Lightwave Technol. 39, 5083–5088 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Dinu, M., Quochi, F. & Garcia, H. Third-order nonlinearities in silicon at telecom wavelengths. Appl. Phys. Lett. 82, 2954–2956 (2003).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Soref, R. A. & Bennett, B. R. Electrooptical effects in silicon. IEEE J. Quantum Electron. 23, 123–129 (1987).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Almeida, V. R. & Lipson, M. Optical bistability on a silicon chip. Optics Lett. 29, 2387–2389 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Priem, G. et al. Optical bistability and pulsating behaviour in silicon-on-insulator ring resonator structures. Opt. Express 13, 9623–9628 (2005).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Sun, C. et al. A 45 nm CMOS-SOI monolithic photonics platform with bit-statistics-based resonant microring thermal tuning. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 51, 893–907 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Guo, K. et al. Nonclassical optical bistability and resonance-locked regime of photon-pair sources using silicon microring resonator. Phys. Rev. Appl. 11, 034007 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Xu, Q. & Lipson, M. Carrier-induced optical bistability in silicon ring resonators. Opt. Lett. 31, 341–343 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Johnson, T. J., Borselli, M. & Painter, O. Self-induced optical modulation of the transmission through a high-Q silicon microdisk resonator. Opt. Express 14, 817–831 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Chen, S., Zhang, L., Fei, Y. & Cao, T. Bistability and self-pulsation phenomena in silicon microring resonators based on nonlinear optical effects. Opt. Express 20, 7454–7468 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. Stojanović, V. et al. Monolithic silicon-photonic platforms in state-of-the-art CMOS SOI processes. Opt. Express 26, 13106–13121 (2018).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Orcutt, J. S. et al. Open foundry platform for high-performance electronic-photonic integration. Opt. Express 20, 12222–12232 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. Sun, C. et al. Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light. Nature 528, 534–538 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Sun, C. et al. TeraPHY: an O-band WDM electro-optic platform for low power, terabit/s optical I/O. In 2020 IEEE Symposium on VLSI Technology 1–2 (IEEE, 2020).

  48. Wade, M. et al. TeraPHY: a chiplet technology for low-power, high-bandwidth in-package optical I/O. IEEE Micro 40, 63–71 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Wade, M. et al. An error-free 1 Tbps WDM optical I/O chiplet and multi-wavelength multi-port laser. In Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2021 F3C.6 (Optica Publishing Group, 2021).

  50. Gentry, C. M. et al. Quantum-correlated photon pairs generated in a commercial 45 nm complementary metal-oxide semiconductor microelectronic chip. Optica 2, 1065–1071 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  51. Gentry, C. M. et al. Monolithic source of entangled photons with integrated pump rejection. In Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, OSA Technical Digest JTh4C.3 (Optica Publishing Group, 2018).

  52. Wade, M. T. et al. 75% efficient wide bandwidth grating couplers in a 45 nm microelectronics CMOS process. In 2015 IEEE Optical Interconnects Conference (OI) 46–47 (IEEE, 2015).

  53. Notaros, J. et al. Ultra-efficient CMOS fiber-to-chip grating couplers. In 2016 Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC) 1–3 (IEEE, 2016).

  54. Atabaki, A. H., Meng, H., Alloatti, L., Mehta, K. K. & Ram, R. J. High-speed polysilicon CMOS photodetector for telecom and datacom. Appl. Phys. Lett. 109, 111106 (2016).

  55. Hosseini, E. S., Yegnanarayanan, S., Atabaki, A. H., Soltani, M. & Adibi, A. Systematic design and fabrication of high-Q single-mode pulley-coupled planar silicon nitride microdisk resonators at visible wavelengths. Opt. Express 18, 2127–2136 (2010).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Shainline, J. M. et al. Depletion-mode carrier-plasma optical modulator in zero-change advanced CMOS. Opt. Lett. 38, 2657–2659 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  57. Grillanda, S. & Morichetti, F. Light-induced metal-like surface of silicon photonic waveguides. Nat. Commun. 6, 8182 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. Alloatti, L. & Ram, R. J. Resonance-enhanced waveguide-coupled silicon-germanium detector. Appl. Phys. Lett. 108, 071105 (2016).

  59. Ong, J. R., Kumar, R., Aguinaldo, R. & Mookherjea, S. Efficient CW four-wave mixing in silicon-on-insulator micro-rings with active carrier removal. IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 25, 1699–1702 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  60. Savanier, M., Kumar, R. & Mookherjea, S. Optimizing photon-pair generation electronically using a p-i-n diode incorporated in a silicon microring resonator. Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 131101 (2015).

  61. Gray, D. et al. Thermo-optic multistability and relaxation in silicon microring resonators with lateral diodes. Phys. Rev. Appl. 14, 024073 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  62. Xie, Y. et al. Thermally-reconfigurable silicon photonic devices and circuits. IEEE J. Sel. Topics Quantum Electron. 26, 3600220 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  63. Sun, C., Timurdogan, E., Watts, M. R. & Stojanović, V. Integrated microring tuning in deep-trench bulk CMOS. In 2013 Optical Interconnects Conference 54–55 (IEEE, 2013).

  64. Collins, M. J. et al. Integrated spatial multiplexing of heralded single-photon sources. Nat. Commun. 4, 2582 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Milanizadeh, M., Aguiar, D., Melloni, A. & Morichetti, F. Canceling thermal cross-talk effects in photonic integrated circuits. J. Lightwave Technol. 37, 1325–1332 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  66. Gurses, B. V., Fatemi, R., Khachaturian, A. & Hajimiri, A. Large-scale crosstalk-corrected thermo-optic phase shifter arrays in silicon photonics. IEEE J. Sel. Topics Quantum Electron. 28, 6101009 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  67. Seok, T. J., Kwon, K., Henriksson, J., Luo, J. & Wu, M. C. Wafer-scale silicon photonic switches beyond die size limit. Optica 6, 490–494 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  68. Jin, W., Feshali, A., Paniccia, M. & Bowers, J. E. Seamless multi-reticle photonics. Opt. Lett. 46, 2984–2987 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  69. Lau, J. H. Recent advances and trends in advanced packaging. IEEE Trans. Compon. Packag. Manuf. Technol. 12, 228–252 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  70. Shekhar, S. et al. Roadmapping the next generation of silicon photonics. Nat. Commun. 15, 751 (2024).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  71. Mahajan, R. et al. Embedded multidie interconnect bridge—a localized, high-density multichip packaging interconnect. IEEE Trans. Compon. Packag. Manuf. Technol. 9, 1952–1962 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  72. Bienfang, J. C. et al. Single-photon sources and detectors dictionary (US Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2023).

  73. Beck, M. Comparing measurements of g(2)(0) performed with different coincidence detection techniques. J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 24, 2972–2978 (2007).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  74. Cabanillas, J. F. et al. Monolithically integrated high-order vernier filters and tuning circuits for electronic-photonic quantum system-on-chip. In Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, Technical Digest Series STh4H.4 (Optica Publishing Group, 2022).

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by NSF EQuIP program grant no. 1842692, Packard Fellowship no. 2012-38222, NSF FuSe TG award no. 2,235,466 and the Catalyst Foundation. We thank Ayar Labs and GlobalFoundries for chip fabrication and the Berkeley Wireless Research Center for chip-testing support.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Danielius Kramnik, Sidney Buchbinder, Panagiotis Zarkos, Christos Adamopoulos & Vladimir M. Stojanović

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Photonics Center, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Imbert Wang, Josep M. Fargas Cabanillas, Ðorđe Gluhović & Miloš A. Popović

  3. Center for Photonic Communication and Computing, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Anirudh Ramesh & Prem Kumar

Authors
  1. Danielius Kramnik
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Imbert Wang
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Anirudh Ramesh
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Josep M. Fargas Cabanillas
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Ðorđe Gluhović
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Sidney Buchbinder
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Panagiotis Zarkos
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Christos Adamopoulos
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  9. Prem Kumar
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  10. Vladimir M. Stojanović
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  11. Miloš A. Popović
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

I.W. and J.M.F.C. designed the photonic components. D.K. and I.W. designed the electronic–photonic system layout. D.K., S.B., C.A. and P.Z. designed the on-chip electronic circuits. S.B. created and supported the electronic–photonic chip design infrastructure and tool flow. D.K. performed the system integration; package design, control firmware and software development; and initial hardware bring-up. D.K., A.R. and Ð.G. collected and analysed the classical electro-optical characterization data. A.R. developed and performed the quantum characterization experiments, and D.K. contributed the data analysis code. A.R. and D.K. conceptualized and conducted the system-level demonstrations. I.W., Ð.G., D.K. and A.R. developed and validated the photon-pair source device model. The paper was prepared by D.K., A.R., I.W. and Ð.G. D.K., A.R. and I.W. created the figures. All authors contributed to the review of the paper. M.A.P., P.K. and V.M.S. supervised and conceptualized the project. These authors contributed equally: D.K., I.W. and A.R.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Danielius Kramnik, Imbert Wang or Anirudh Ramesh.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Electronics thanks Ali Elshaari, Ryota Katsumi and Jianwei Wang for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 High-Extinction Pump Rejection Filter.

(a) Measurement setup for characterizing the extinction ratio of the integrated pump rejection filters. The filters are aligned by using an EDFA in place of the tunable laser to intentionally generate broadband ASE noise, and then maximizing the drop port power meter readings using a Nelder-Mead optimization algorithm. The tunable laser is then swapped back in to take a transmission spectrum. (b) Normalized transmission spectrum of input to drop port response of the aligned filter using a series of stitched continuous sweeps with varying power meter range settings (blue curve) showing ~ 95 dB extinction that is limited by ASE noise of the laser source passing through the aligned passband. When an external ASE filter is enabled and the integration time is increased, the noise floor falls below the minimum detectable level of the power meter, indicating > 100 dB extinction at an offset wavelength of one FSR of the photon-pair source, which is required for fully on-chip pump filtering (red points). The filter uses a Vernier scheme to extend the FSR, resulting in less extinction (~ 60 dB) at the FSRs of the cascaded sub-filters, which are selected not to align with either the pump laser or other single-photon channel when the pump rejection filter is aligned to a particular signal or idler output wavelength. Limited heater tuning range prevented the on-chip filters from being aligned to a photon-pair source resonance wavelength on all tested chips, which is correctable by improving the source and filter heater designs and slightly adjusting the microring radii to target specific resonance wavelengths, reducing the initial error between the source and filter resonances. We have characterized the insertion loss of this filter to be < 1 dB using measurements at a separate test site with through port and drop port grating couplers oriented in the same direction, allowing the same fiber to measure both ports one at a time74.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections 1–5.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Kramnik, D., Wang, I., Ramesh, A. et al. Scalable feedback stabilization of quantum light sources on a CMOS chip. Nat Electron 8, 620–630 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-025-01410-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-025-01410-5

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing