Optical Binary Encoder and Decoder With Ultra-Low Power Consumption

Abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate on-chip optical encoder and decoder with ultra-low power consumption. The key device is a silicon photonic crystal (PC) L3 nanocavity with small mode volume. Consequently, the nonlinear effects in the nanocavity are strongly enhanced and could be excited by lower powers. Leveraging different optical power levels, the transmission spectra of the PC nanocavity could be flexibly manipulated. By utilizing proper determining powers, the output powers could be defined as the corresponding optical codes. In the experiment, the binary encoder and decoder are successfully demonstrated with required optical powers of 0.04 mW and 0.032 mW, respectively. Unlike most previous optical encoders and decoders with high powers (tens of milliwatts) or large size (several square millimeters), our scheme which could simultaneously realize the optical encoder and decoder only requires ultra-low powers as 0.04 mW with a compact size of 100 μm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> . To the best of our knowledge, it is a record combined the power consumption and device size for on-chip optical encoder and decoder.