All-optical Phase Regeneration with Record PSA Extinction Ratio in a Low-birefringence Silicon Germanium Waveguide

Abstract

We report a low-power continuous wave-pumped phase sensitive amplifier (PSA)-based phase regenerator implemented in a passive silicon-based waveguide. A polarization assisted-PSA, consisting of two orthogonally-polarized pumps and a phase-locked signal copolarized to one of them, was implemented in a low-birefringence silicon germanium (SiGe) waveguide. The strong TE/TM modal symmetry of the waveguide and its large nonlinear coefficient enabled the achievement of an extremely large phase sensitive extinction ratio of approximately 29 dB for a total input power of only 21.3 dBm. This SiGe-based PSA was used to demonstrate phase regeneration on a 20 Gb/s differential phase-shift keying signal, thereby reducing its error vector magnitude and phase error by three and six times respectively and enabling a bit-error ratio improvement of up to 2 dB.