Compact and low-insertion-loss polarization beam-splitting multimode filter using pixelated waveguides.

A polarization beam-splitting multimode filter using pixelated waveguides has been presented and experimentally demonstrated in this paper. Finite difference time domain method and direct binary search optimization algorithm are employed to optimize pixelated waveguides to realize compact size, broad bandwidth, large extinction ratio, low insertion loss, and good polarization extinction ratio. Measurement results show that, in a wavelength range from 1520 to 1560 nm, for the fabricated device working at transverse-electric polarization, the measured insertion loss is less than 1.23 dB and extinction ratio is larger than 15.14 dB, while for transverse-magnetic polarization, the corresponding insertion loss lower than 0.74 dB and extinction ratio greater than 15.50 dB are realized. The measured polarization extinction ratio larger than 15.02 dB is achieved. The device's length is only 15.4 µm.

On-chip Ce:YIG/Si Mach-Zehnder optical isolator with low power consumption.

The integrated optical isolator is an essential building block in photonic integrated chips. However, the performance of on-chip isolators based on the magneto-optic (MO) effect has been limited due to the magnetization requirement of permanent magnets or metal microstrips on MO materials. Here, an MZI optical isolator built on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) without any external magnetic field is proposed. A multi-loop graphene microstrip operating as an integrated electromagnet above the waveguide, instead of the traditional metal microstrip, generates the saturated magnetic fields required for the nonreciprocal effect. Subsequently, the optical transmission can be tuned by varying the intensity of currents applied on the graphene microstrip. Compared with gold microstrip, the power consumption is reduced by 70.8%, and temperature fluctuation is reduced by 69.5% while preserving the isolation ratio of 29.44 dB and the insertion loss of 2.99 dB at1550 nm.

Low-loss and broadband polarization-insensitive high-order mode pass filter based on photonic crystal and tapered coupler.

In this Letter, a polarization-insensitive high-order mode pass filter is presented, designed, and experimentally demonstrated. When TE0, TM0, TE1, and TM1 modes are injected into the input port, TM0 and TE0 modes are filtered, and TE1 and TM1 modes exit from the output port. To attain compactness, broad bandwidth, low insertion loss, excellent extinction ratio, and polarization-insensitive property, the finite difference time domain method and direct-binary-search or particle swarm optimization algorithm are employed for the optimization of structural parameters of the photonic crystal region and the coupling region in the tapered coupler. Measurement results reveal that, for the fabricated filter working at TE polarization, the extinction ratio and insertion loss are 20.42 and 0.32 dB at 1550 nm. In the case of TM polarization, the corresponding extinction ratio and insertion loss are 21.43 and 0.30 dB. Within a bandwidth from 1520 to 1590 nm, insertion loss smaller than 0.86 dB and extinction ratio larger than 16.80 dB are obtained for the fabricated filter working at TE polarization, while in the case of TM polarization, insertion loss lower than 0.79 dB and extinction ratio greater than 17.50 dB are realized.

Broadband multimode 3 dB optical power splitter using tapered couplers.

A design of a 1 × 2 multimode 3 dB optical power splitter using tapered couplers is proposed and investigated in this paper. As an example, a 1 × 2 splitter processing five-lowest order transverse-electric-polarized modes is designed and optimized by utilizing finite difference time domain method and particle swarm optimization algorithm. To verify the feasibility of this novel design, the optimized device is fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator platform. The coupling lengths of tapered couplers are respectively 6.5 µm, 6.0 µm, 3.5 µm, 5.0 µm, 5.0 µm, 7.5 µm, 6.0 µm, 5.0 µm, and 8.0 µm. Measurement results reveal that, for the fabricated splitter, the power uniformity varies from 0.041 to 0.88 dB, the crosstalk ranges from -23.96 to -14.12 dB, and the insertion loss changes from 0.089 to 1.50 dB within a bandwidth from 1520 to 1600 nm.

Wavelet convolutional neural network for robust and fast temperature measurements in Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry.

In this paper, a wavelet convolutional neural network (WNN) consisting of a one-dimensional (1D) convolutional neural network and a self-adaptive wavelet neural network has been proposed and demonstrated experimentally for temperature measurement in a Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry (BOTDR) system. Based on the analysis of the system noise, it follows the Gaussian white noise distribution along the time-related sensing distance. The impact of the noise in time-domain on the measured Brillouin gain spectra (BGSs) could be neglected, so that the BGSs in the fiber can be regarded as a series of 1D input data of the proposed WNN. Different self-adaptive wavelet activation functions connected to each output of the full-connection network are adopted to realize the multi-scaled analysis and the scale translation, which can obtain more local characteristics in frequency-domain. The output extracted by the WNN is Brillouin frequency shift (BFS), which presents linearity correlation to the actual temperature. Considering the multi-parameters including different frequency ranges, signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs), BFSs and spectral widths (SWs), a general model of the proposed WNN is trained to handle more extreme cases, in which it doesn't require retraining for different single-mode (SM) optical fibers in BOTDR sensing system. The performances of the WNN are compared with other two techniques, the Lorentzian curve fitting based on Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm and the basic neural network (NN) containing input and output layers together with two hidden layers. Both the simulated and measured results show that the WNN has better robustness and flexibility than the LM and the NN. Besides, the computational accuracy of the WNN is improved and the fluctuation of that is slighter, especially when the SNR is less than 11 dB. Moreover, the WNN takes approximately 0.54 s to measure the temperature from the 18,000 collected BGSs transmitted through the 18 km SM optical fiber. The calculating time of the WNN is greatly reduced by three orders of magnitude in comparison with that of the LM, and is comparable to that of the NN. It proves that the proposed WNN may provide a feasible or even better scheme for the robust and fast temperature measurement in BOTDR system.

Ultra-compact and low-loss silicon polarization beam splitter using a particle-swarm-optimized counter-tapered coupler.

In this paper, an on-chip silicon polarization beam splitter using a particle-swarm-optimized counter-tapered directional coupler is proposed, designed, and fabricated. The coupling length of the proposed device is only 5 µm. As the waveguide width variation ΔW increases from -20 to 20 nm, the simulated polarization extinction ratio larger than 18.67 dB and the corresponding insertion loss lower than 0.17 dB are achieved. Measured experimental results achieved insertion loss <0.50 dB, TE polarization extinction between 16.68 to 31.87 dB, TM polarization extinction between 17.78 to 31.13 dB, over the wavelength range 1525 to 1600 nm.

Compact and low-loss 1 × 3 polarization-insensitive optical power splitter using cascaded tapered silicon waveguides.

In this Letter, a 1×3 polarization-insensitive optical power splitter based on cascaded tapered silicon waveguides is proposed and experimentally demonstrated on a silicon-on-insulator platform. By utilizing the particle swarm optimization algorithm and the finite difference time domain method, the structural parameters of the coupling regions are carefully designed to achieve polarization-insensitive property, compact size, low insertion loss, high uniformity, and broad bandwidth. The coupling length can be as short as 7.3 µm. Our measurement results show that, at 1550 nm, the insertion losses of the fabricated device operating in transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) polarizations are, respectively, 0.068 dB and 0.62 dB. Within a bandwidth from 1525 to 1575 nm, the insertion loss is lower than 0.82 dB and the uniformity is less than 1 dB for the fabricated device operating in TE polarization, while the fabricated device operating in TM polarization can have an insertion loss smaller than 1.50 dB and a uniformity lower than 1 dB from 1528 to 1582 nm.

Twin-Fano resonator with widely tunable slope for ultra-high-resolution wavelength monitor.

A twin-Fano resonator based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is demonstrated on a silicon-on-insulator platform. A dual-microring resonator replaces one of the couplers of the MZI to achieve twin-Fano resonance, which originates from the interference and coupling of modes in a dual-microring resonator. The slope can be tuned in a wide range from -84.2 dB/nm to 91.0 dB/nm by metal heaters integrated on one arm of the MZI, and the resonant wavelength remains fixed when the slope changes. The "X-type" spectrum is shown by self-alignment, which means manual alignment to form the X-type line is unnecessary after tuning dual-microrings because the X-type line can be produced easily by the difference in two correlated spectra rather than two independent spectra. The measurement shows high wavelength resolution of 1 pm in the region of the slope of 127.4 dB/nm, which can be applied to wavelength monitoring with ultra-high resolution.

Experimental demonstration of a flexible-grid 1×2 wavelength-selective switch based on silicon microring resonators.

An integrated flexible-grid 1×2 wavelength-selective switch based on reconfigurable add-drop silicon microring resonators using strip waveguides is designed and experimentally demonstrated. By flexibly tuning the resonance of microring resonators and path phase differences via the thermo-optic effect, the transmission spectra with adjustable bandwidths can be formed as desired at the output ports. Our experimental results reveal that the fabricated flexible-grid 1×2 wavelength-selective switch provides crosstalk lower than -10.39 dB. The 3-dB bandwidth varies from 0.38 nm to 1 nm, the in-band ripple is less than 0.52 dB, and the response time is about 17.6 µs.

Broadband tunable filter based on the loop of multimode Bragg grating.

A broadband tunable silicon filter has been demonstrated on silicon-on-insulator platform. The device is based on the loop of multimode anti-symmetric waveguide Bragg grating. A wide bandwidth tunability about 1.455 THz (0.117-1.572 THz) is achieved. The device, functions like a ring, can realize the bandwidth tunable of the drop port and the through port. And, its feature has simultaneous wavelength tuning and no free space ranges limitation. A high out-of-band contrast of 30 dB is achieved with a bandwidth of 1.572 THz (Δλ = 13 nm). The out-of-band contrast is 18 dB at the minimum bandwidth 0.117 THz (Δλ = 1.0 nm).

Continuously tunable true-time delay lines based on a one-dimensional grating waveguide for beam steering in phased array antennas.

In this paper, we propose integrated one-dimensional (1D) grating waveguide-based true-time delay (TTD) lines on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. Through optimizing the structure of the proposed waveguide, a time delay of 77.23 ps/mm can be readily achieved in a wavelength tuning range from 1540.20 nm to 1558.97 nm. Compared to conventional photonic crystal waveguide-based TTDs, the proposed waveguide occupies 70% less chip surface and has much lower propagation loss when compared with 2D photonic crystal devices. Therefore, a larger time delay can be achieved on-chip. To facilitate low loss coupling from strip waveguides to 1D grating waveguides and vice versa, a novel step taper is designed and shows a coupling efficiency of over 78%. Based on the 1D grating waveguide, a 1×4 beam steering module is designed and simulated. A wide beam steering angle from -67.84° to 67.84° for the X-band four-element phased array antenna with an array pitch size of 1.25 cm is obtained.

On-chip reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer for hybrid wavelength/mode-division-multiplexing systems.

A silicon-based on-chip reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) is presented for hybrid wavelength-division-multiplexing-mode-division-multiplexing systems. The present ROADM consists of a four-channel mode demultiplexer, four wavelength-selective thermo-optic switches based on microring resonators, and a four-channel mode multiplexer. With the present ROADM, one can add/drop one of wavelength channels of any mode to/from the multimode bus waveguide successfully with an excess loss of 2-5 dB and an extinction ratio of ∼20 dB over a wavelength range of 1525-1555 nm.

Silicon lateral-apodized add-drop filter for on-chip optical interconnection.

A lateral-apodized add-drop filter is demonstrated in a multimode asymmetric waveguide Bragg grating. This design utilizes two individual superposed gratings with the same sidewall corrugation depth. The strong side lobes of the grating filter are efficiently suppressed by mapping the target apodization profile into lateral shifts between the periods of the two gratings. Compared with other apodized technology, this device is easier to be realized. Experimental results show that the side-lobes suppression ratio can reach 18.5 dB, and a bandwidth of 9.5 nm is achieved by a large corrugation width of 150 nm. The insertion loss at the drop port is only 0.8 dB, and the extinction ratio is up to 24 dB at the through port.

Bandwidth and wavelength tunable optical passband filter based on silicon multiple microring resonators.

An ultra-compact silicon bandpass filter with wide bandwidth tunability is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The filter architecture is based on a multiple micro-ring resonator-cascaded structure. A wide bandwidth tunability (from 75 to 300 GHz) can be achieved by controlling the resonant frequency of the microring resonators when a good shape factor (0.24-0.44) is held. The filter has a wide free spectral range (about 1.2 THz). The center wavelength can be tuned over several nanometers linearly. The footprint is only 0.053 mm2.

Silicon band-rejection and band-pass filter based on asymmetric Bragg sidewall gratings in a multimode waveguide.

A silicon photonic wire filter based on an asymmetric sidewall Bragg grating in a multimode silicon-on-insulator strip waveguide is demonstrated. The operating principle is based on the contra-directional coupling between the transverse electric fundamental (TE0) and first-order (TE1) modes, which is enabled by the asymmetric spatially periodic refractive-index perturbations. An asymmetric Y-junction is cascaded at the input port of the filter so as to drop the Bragg reflection. Compared with conventional Bragg grating-based filters, this device eliminates the back reflection at the input port and the 6 dB inherent insertion loss at the drop port; moreover, a narrow 3 dB bandwidth can be obtained with a large critical dimension as a result of the weak coupling strength between the TE0 and TE1 modes inside the multimode waveguide. Experimental results show that a bandwidth of ∼2.8 nm is achieved by a large corrugation width of 150 nm. The insertion loss at the drop port is -2.1 dB, and the extinction ratio is -33 dB at the through port.

Silicon three-mode (de)multiplexer based on cascaded asymmetric Y junctions.

A three-mode (de)multiplexer based on two cascaded asymmetric Y junctions is proposed and experimentally demonstrated on a silicon-on-insulator platform for mode-division multiplexing applications. Within a bandwidth from 1537 to 1566 nm, the best demultiplexing crosstalk of the fabricated device, composed of a three-mode multiplexer, a multimode straight waveguide, and a three-mode demultiplexer, is up to -31.5 dB, while in the worst case it is -9.7 dB. The measured maximum insertion loss is about 5.7 dB at a wavelength of 1550 nm. The mode crosstalk and insertion loss can be further improved by high-quality fabrication processes.

Fano-resonance-based ultra-high-resolution ratio-metric wavelength monitor on silicon.

An integrated ultra-high-resolution ratio-metric wavelength monitor (RMWM) with compact size based on slope tunable Fano resonance is demonstrated on silicon. The Fano resonance is generated by adding an asymmetric microring inside and coupling with the outer ring to produce a nonlinear phase shift. The slope tunability is achieved by controlling the microheaters to adjust the phase condition. Two asymmetric embedded microring resonators (AEMR) are functioned as edge filters and designed to achieve an "X-type" spectral response in a particular wavelength range. An ultra-high resolution of 0.8 pm in a 0.47 nm wide wavelength range is experimentally demonstrated. This device could be applied in on-chip high-sensitivity wavelength monitoring sensing.

Integrated high responsivity photodetectors based on graphene/glass hybrid waveguide.

We propose and fabricate an integrated graphene/glass hybrid photodetector (PD) with high responsivity and broad spectral bandwidth. The glass straight waveguide enables high absorption of the evanescent light of transverse magnetic (TM) mode propagating parallel to the single layer of graphene. It is based on the mechanism of light-induced change in conductance. As a result, a responsivity as high as 0.72 A/W at a low bias voltage of -0.1 V for a wide wavelength range from 1510 to 1630 nm is experimentally obtained. The proposed graphene/glass hybrid PD could find important applications in graphene-based photonic integrated circuits.

Measurement of the intermodal crosstalk of a bent multimode waveguide.

We quantitatively investigate the main source of the intermodal crosstalk of a silicon-based bent multimode waveguide by experiment. The measurement is performed through time-domain scanning low-coherence interferometry. From the measurement results, one can not only calculate the modal crosstalk, but can also locate the position where the crosstalk appears. The results indicate that the modal mismatch at the points where the curvature of the waveguide changes is the main origin of the modal crosstalk. For a two-mode waveguide with a bending radius of 5 µm at 1310 nm, the crosstalk is as high as -20 and -16 dB for the fundamental and first-order mode, respectively. This work gives us a deep insight into how the guided modes actually propagate through the bent waveguide.

On-chip microwave signal generation based on a silicon microring modulator.

A photonic-assisted microwave signal generator based on a silicon microring modulator is demonstrated. The microring cavity incorporates an embedded PN junction that enables a microwave signal to modulate the lightwave circling inside. The DC component of the modulated light is trapped in the cavity, while the high-order sideband components are able to exit the cavity and then generate microwave signals at new frequencies in a photodetector. In our proof-of-concept experiment, a 10 GHz microwave signal is converted to a 20 GHz signal in the optical domain with an electrical harmonic suppression ratio of 22 dB. An analytic model is also established to explain the operation mechanism, which agrees well with the measured data.