Microwave plasmonic mixer in a transparent fibre-wireless link.

To cope with the high bandwidth requirements of wireless applications1, carrier frequencies are shifting towards the millimetre-wave and terahertz bands2-5. Conversely, data is normally transported to remote wireless antennas by optical fibres. Therefore, full transparency and flexibility to switch between optical and wireless domains would be desirable6,7. Here, we demonstrate for the first time a direct wireless-to-optical receiver in a transparent optical link. We successfully transmit 20 and 10 Gbit/s over wireless distances of 1 and 5 m at a carrier frequency of 60 GHz, respectively. Key to the breakthrough was a plasmonic mixer directly mapping the wireless information onto optical signals. The plasmonic scheme with its subwavelength feature and pronounced field confinement provides a built-in field enhancement of up to 90'000 over the incident field in an ultra-compact and CMOS compatible structure. The plasmonic mixer is not limited by electronic speed and thus compatible with future terahertz technologies.

Plasmonic modulator with >170 GHz bandwidth demonstrated at 100 GBd NRZ.

We demonstrate a plasmonic Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulator with a flat frequency response exceeding 170 GHz. The modulator comprises two phase modulators exploiting the Pockels effect of an organic electro-optic material in plasmonic slot waveguides. We further show modulation at 100 GBd NRZ and 60 GBd PAM-4. The electrical drive signals were generated using a 100 GSa/s digital to analog converter (DAC). The high-speed and small-scale devices are relevant for next-generation optical interconnects.

Plasmonic phased array feeder enabling ultra-fast beam steering at millimeter waves.

In this paper, we demonstrate an integrated microwave phoneeded for beamtonics phased array antenna feeder at 60 GHz with a record-low footprint. Our design is based on ultra-compact plasmonic phase modulators (active area <2.5µm2) that not only provide small size but also ultra-fast tuning speed. In our design, the integrated circuit footprint is in fact only limited by the contact pads of the electrodes and by the optical feeding waveguides. Using the high speed of the plasmonic modulators, we demonstrate beam steering with less than 1 ns reconfiguration time, i.e. the beam direction is reconfigured in-between 1 GBd transmitted symbols.

High speed plasmonic modulator array enabling dense optical interconnect solutions.

Plasmonic modulators might pave the way for a new generation of compact low-power high-speed optoelectronic devices. We introduce an extremely compact transmitter based on plasmonic Mach-Zehnder modulators offering a capacity of 4 × 36 Gbit/s on a footprint that is only limited by the size of the high-speed contact pads. The transmitter array is contacted through a multicore fiber with a channel spacing of 50 µm.

Plasmonic-organic hybrid (POH) modulators for OOK and BPSK signaling at 40 Gbit/s.

We report on high-speed plasmonic-organic hybrid Mach-Zehnder modulators comprising ultra-compact phase shifters with lengths as small as 19 µm. Choosing an optimum phase shifter length of 29 µm, we demonstrate 40 Gbit/s on-off keying (OOK) modulation with direct detection and a BER < 6 × 10(-4). Furthermore, we report on a 29 µm long binary-phase shift keying (BPSK) modulator and show that it operates error-free (BER < 1 × 10(-10)) at data rates up to 40 Gbit/s and with an energy consumption of 70 fJ/bit.