All-optical 10 Gb/s AND logic gate in a silicon microring resonator

Meng Xiong,Lei Lei,Christophe Peucheret,Xinliang Zhang,Yunhong Ding,Haiyan Ou,Bo Huang

doi:10.1364/oe.21.025772

Abstract

An all-optical AND logic gate in a single silicon microring resonator is experimentally demonstrated at 10 Gb/s with 50% RZ-OOK signals. By setting the wavelengths of two intensity-modulated input pumps on the resonances of the microring resonator, field-enhanced four-wave mixing with a total input power of only 8.5 dBm takes place in the ring, resulting in the generation of an idler whose intensity follows the logic operation between the pumps. Clear and open eye diagrams with a bit-error- ratio below 10(-9) are achieved.

Highlights

All-optical signal processing is recognized as a key approach to break the speed limitations of electronics in future high capacity and ultrafast communication networks [1,2]
The Continuous waves (CW) lights were combined in a 3 dB polarization maintaining coupler and modulated in a single Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) pulse carver driven by a 10 GHz radio frequency clock followed by another MZM driven with a 10 Gb/s pseudo-random pattern originating from a bit-pattern generator (BPG), resulting in the generation of two 50% return-to-zero on-off keying (RZ-OOK) signals at 10 Gb/s with pseudo-random bit sequence (PRBS) length of 27-1
The two RZ-OOK data streams were duplicated by a 3 dB coupler and selected according to their wavelength by 0.3 nm and 0.5 nm bandpass filters (BPF), respectively

Summary

Introduction

All-optical signal processing is recognized as a key approach to break the speed limitations of electronics in future high capacity and ultrafast communication networks [1,2]. All-optical signal processing based on strong nonlinearities induced by the high Kerr index and the small effective areas [13,14] of siliconon-insulator (SOI) waveguides has been widely studied in the last decade Functionalities such as parametric amplification [13,14], wavelength conversion [15,16], signal regeneration [17,18] and modulation format conversion [19] have been successfully demonstrated. Logic gates based on free carrier dispersion without any active carrier sweeping method [23] or on the thermo-optic effect [24] in silicon MRRs are limited to low operation speeds (2~310 Mb/s) Other materials, such as III-V semiconductors, present a high Kerr nonlinearity and, in some cases (e.g. InGaP or AlGaAs) are free from TPA at telecommunication wavelengths around 1550 nm. Compared with the WG, 3 dB larger FWM conversion efficiency and 1 dB smaller power penalty can be experimentally achieved in the MRR

Operation principle

Device fabrication

Experimental results and discussion

10 GHz RF CLOCK

Conclusion