Broadband Wavelength Conversion for Hybrid Multiplexing Signals Based on a Parallel Dispersion-Engineered Silicon Waveguide

Abstract

Broadband all-optical wavelength conversion (AOWC) for hybrid wavelength- and mode-division multiplexing (WDM-MDM) signals is experimentally demonstrated based on degenerate four-wave mixing in a silicon chip with a parallel dispersion-optimized multimode nonlinear waveguide and mode (de)multiplexers. By simultaneously coupling two modes into the waveguide using an optical fiber array, the intermodal crosstalk is measured to be as low as −25.9 dB for the fundamental mode of the transverse electric mode (TE <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> ) (or −23.6 dB for the first-order mode TE <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> ), and the conversion efficiency is −25.4 dB for TE <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> (or −26.3 dB for TE <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> ) mode. A wide conversion bandwidth of ∼68 nm is measured except for the influence of the crosstalk, which is the first time to experimentally demonstrate the broadband wavelength conversion for MDM signal. Using a 4 × 10 Gbit/s on-off keying (OOK) hybrid WDM-MDM signal, four AOWC channels are obtained on the idlers and the power penalty of each channel is less than 2.7 dB at the bit-error-ratio of 1 × 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−9</sup> .