[azernik]

From this part of the article, the team seems fairly confident in their ability to integrate the laser onto the same die as the waveguides. This seems very plausible to me, given how standard this integration is in communications applications (eg fiber optic transceivers)

> Our device is a 0.5 mm x 6 mm silicon photonic chip with steerable transmitting and receiving phased arrays and on-chip germanium photodetectors. The laser itself is not part of these particular chips, but our group and others have demonstrated on-chip lasers that can be integrated in the future.

[mstresh]

The Watts group at MIT has done some fantastic work into rare-earth doped silicon waveguides to produce lasers on a silicon platform [0]. However, I believe this work is still very much in the research stage. I'm not convinced their method is scalable to production for this $10 & million-unit-per-year LIDAR application since Erbium-doped waveguide lasers still require an off-chip pump laser source.

[0] (PDF): http://www.rle.mit.edu/pmg/documents/OpticsExpress2014Bradle...