All-silicon multi-band TM-pass polarizer on a 220 nm SOI enabled by multiplexing grating regimes.

We propose an all-silicon design of a multi-band transverse-magnetic-pass (TM-pass) polarizer. The device is based on one-dimensional gratings that work under different regimes that depend on the polarization. With a tapered structure, it is revealed that the operation bandwidth can be extended by multiplexing the diffraction in O-band and the reflection in S-, C-, and L-bands for the transverse-electric (TE) mode. By simulation, we achieve a 343 nm device bandwidth with insertion loss (IL) < 0.4 dB and polarization extinction ratio (PER) > 20 dB. The operation wavelength range covers commonly-used optical telecommunication bands including the O-, S-, C-, and L- bands. Experimental results also show IL < 1.6 dB and PER > 20 dB from 1265 nm to 1360 nm corresponding to the O-band, and from 1500 nm to 1617 nm that corresponds to the C-band. The device is a single-etched design on the standard 220 nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) with silicon oxide cladding. Such a simple and compatible design paves the way for developing practical multi-band silicon photonic integrated circuits.

50 Gb/s short-reach interconnects with DSP-free direct-detection enabled by CAPS codes.

We experimentally demonstrate 50 Gb/s transmission below an uncorrected bit error rate (BER) of 10-3 in the C band over a transmission reach that extends from 0 to 20 km using combined amplitude and phase shift (CAPS) codes. The CAPS signal, which is not required to be specifically dispersion compensated for each reach within the 20 km operating range, is amenable for simple direct detection using a single photodetector without any subsequent digital signal processing (DSP). Hence, the presented solution constitutes a potentially attractive low cost solution for mobile Xhaul applications employing single mode fiber interconnects with reaches extending to 20 km. Furthermore, the CAPS signaling is compared to other modulation schemes all delivering 50 Gb/s and is found to outperform on-off-keying (OOK), 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) and dispersion precompensated OOK in terms of dispersion tolerance. At a lower reach of 10 km, the maximum bit rate that can be achieved using CAPS coding at a BER below 10-3 is found to increase to 67 Gb/s. In addition, using the same testbed, we experimentally tested the IQ duobinary modulation format, which is an alternative format that approximates the CAPS transmitted waveforms in order to omit the need for a power consuming digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to generate the transmitted waveforms at the expense of slightly worse dispersion tolerance. Though the IQ duobinary format can be in principle generated using a simple DAC-less analog transmitter, our proof-of-concept experiment used a DAC to emulate the analog transmitter by generating the corresponding transmitted waveforms due to unavailability of all required analog parts. The IQ duobinary format was found experimentally to enable 50 Gb/s over a reach of ~17 km; that is slightly less than a CAPS signal at the same bit rate. Finally, we verified the excellent performance of the CAPS signaling in an ASE-limited regime where the CAPS signal achieved very low OSNR penalty after 10 km relative to OOK in back-to-back.

DSP-free 'coherent-lite' transceiver for next generation single wavelength optical intra-datacenter interconnects.

We propose a DSP-free coherent-lite system that requires neither high-speed DSP nor high-resolution signal converters for deployment inside datacenters over single mode fiber links with reaches of 10 km and less. The removal of converters and DSP, in which some subsystems are fundamental for successful coherent detection, is enabled by either replacing DSP subsystems with optics having equivalent functions or by re-engineering the system. We validate in a proof-of-concept experiment the proposed DSP-free system using 50 Gbaud DP-16QAM delivering 400 Gb/s over 10 km of single mode fiber (SMF) below the KP4 forward error correction (FEC) threshold of 2.2 × 10-4. In addition, we perform a detailed experimental parametric study of the coherent-lite system in which various system parameters are swept such as baud rate, reach, laser power and laser linewidth. Our results verify that the coherent-lite system can be realized using low-cost DFB lasers with linewidths of a few hundred kHz. Moreover, we compare the performance of the coherent-lite system with that of a conventional coherent transceiver leveraging the full DSP stack. Then, we evaluate the power consumption savings achieved by the coherent-lite scheme relative to a classic DSP-based coherent system. Assuming a CMOS node ranging from 28 to 7 nm for DSP implementation, our estimate shows that the coherent-lite scheme can save 95 to 78% of the power consumed by the following subsystems: analog-to-digital converters, chromatic dispersion compensation, 2 × 2 MIMO polarization demultiplexing and carrier recovery. Finally, we compare the power consumption of the coherent-lite scheme with more standard 400G IM-DD systems utilizing either eight or four parallel WDM lanes (8 × 50G and 4 × 100G). The coherent-lite system is found to have similar module power consumption requirements as a corresponding 4 × 100G IM-DD system while bringing the benefits of coherent detection including improved sensitivity and higher spectral efficiency leading to fewer light sources per transceiver module. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first experimental demonstration of a DSP-free coherent-lite system for single channel 400G datacenter 10 km interconnects, a potential attractive solution due to its scalability to future 800G and 1.6T intra-datacenter optical interconnects.

Glass interposer for short reach optical connectivity.

We propose a glass interposer containing femtosecond laser-scribed waveguides to interconnect silicon photonic chips. The glass interposer has an insertion loss of about 1.5 dB/cm, and simplifies alignment of silicon photonic chips. Our experiment shows that the insertion loss for the grating coupler/inscribed glass interface was only 0.5 dB higher than the estimated coupling loss of grating coupler to SMF. The 3 dB coupling degradation occurs after 5 µm of in-plane displacement between the laser-inscribed waveguide and the grating coupler.

Experimental study of 112 Gb/s short reach transmission employing PAM formats and SiP intensity modulator at 1.3 µm.

We present a Silicon Photonic (SiP) intensity modulator operating at 1.3 µm with pulse amplitude modulation formats for short reach transmission employing a digital to analog converter for the RF signal generator, enabling pulse shaping and precompensation of the transmitter's frequency response. Details of the SiP Mach-Zehnder interfometer are presented. We study the system performance at various bit rates, PAM orders and propagation distances. To the best of our knowledge, we report the first demonstration of a 112 Gb/s transmission over 10 km of SMF fiber operating below pre-FEC BER threshold of 3.8 × 10(-3) employing PAM-8 at 37.4 Gbaud using a fully packaged SiP modulator. An analytical model for the Q-factor metric applicable for multilevel PAM-N signaling is derived and accurately experimentally verified in the case of Gaussian noise limited detection. System performance is experimentally investigated and it is demonstrated that PAM order selection can be optimally chosen as a function of the desired throughput. We demonstrate the ability of the proposed transmitter to exhibit software-defined transmission for short reach applications by selecting PAM order, symbol rate and pulse shape.