Four-wave mixing in silicon-nanocrystal embedded high-index doped silica micro-ring resonator

A nonlinear integrated optical platform that allows the fabrication of waveguide circuits with different material composition,and at small dimensions,offers advantages in terms of field enhancement and increased interaction length,thereby facilitating the observation of nonlinear optics effects at a much lower power level.To enhance the nonlinearity of the conventional waveguide structure,in this work,we propose and demonstrate a microstructured waveguide where silicon rich layer is embedded in the core of the conventional waveguide in order to increase its nonlinearity.By embedding a 20 nm thin film of silicon nanocrystal(Si-nc),we achieve a twofold increase of the nonlinear parameter,γ.The linear relationship between the fourwave mixing conversion efficiency and pump power reveals the negligible nonlinear absorption and small dispersion in the micro-ring resonators.This simple approach of embedding an ultra-thin Si-nc layer into conventional high-index doped silica dramatically increases its nonlinear performance,and could potentially find applications in all-optical processing functions.

Low-loss and polarization insensitive 32×4 optical switch for ROADM applications

Integrated switches play a crucial role in the development of reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers(ROADMs)that have greater flexibility and compactness,ultimately leading to robust single-chip solutions.Despite decades of research on switches with various structures and platforms,achieving a balance between dense integration,low insertion loss(IL),and polarization-dependent loss(PDL)remains a significant challenge.In this paper,we propose and demonstrate a 32×4 optical switch using high-index doped silica glass(HDSG)for ROADM applications.This switch is designed to route any of the 32 inputs to the express ports or drop any channels from 32 inputs to the target 4 drop ports or add any of the 4 ports to any of the 32 express channels.The switch comprises 188 MachZehnder Interferometer(MZI)type switch elements,88 optical vias for the 44 optical bridges,and 618 waveguidewaveguide crossings with three-dimensional(3D)structures.At 1550 nm,the fiber-to-fiber loss for each express channel is below 2 dB,and across the C and L bands,below 3 dB.For each input channel to all 4 drop/add channels at 1550 nm,the loss is less than 3.5 dB and less than 5 dB across the C and L bands.The PDLs for all express and input channels to the 4 drop/add channels are below 0.3 dB over the C band,and the crosstalk is under−50 dB for both the C and L bands.

CMOS-compatible high-index doped silica waveguide with an embedded silicon-nanocrystal strip for all-optical analog-to-digital conversion

Passive all-optical signal processors that overcome the electronic bottleneck can potentially be the enabling components for the next-generation high-speed and lower power consumption systems. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a CMOS-compatible waveguide and its application to the all-optical analog-to-digital converter(ADC) under the nonlinear spectral splitting and filtering scheme. As the key component of the proposed ADC, a 50 cm long high-index doped silica glass spiral waveguide is composed of a thin silicon-nanocrystal(Si-nc) layer embedded in the core center for enhanced nonlinearity. The device simultaneously possesses low loss(0.16 dB/cm at 1550 nm), large nonlinearity(305 W^-1∕km at 1550 nm), and negligible nonlinear absorption.A 2-bit ADC basic unit is achieved when pumped by the proposed waveguide structure at the telecom band and without any additional amplification. Simulation results that are consistent with the experimental ones are also demonstrated, which further confirm the feasibility of the proposed scheme for larger quantization resolution.This demonstrated approach enables a fully monolithic solution for all-optical ADC in the future, which can digitize broadband optical signals directly at low power consumption. This has great potential on the applications of high-speed optical communications, networks, and signal processing systems.