Recent progress in on-chip signaling with ultra-compact integrated photonic devices

Abstract

Photonic integrated circuits facilitate possible integration of complete optical communication systems on a chip and enable chip-scale optical interconnection networks. On-chip signaling is one of the key technologies. In this paper, we review our recent research works in on-chip signaling with digital and analog modulation signals through ultra-compact integrated photonic devices. Using our designed and fabricated silicon photonic devices, 1) we experimentally demonstrate on-chip signaling of advanced multi-carrier multi-level modulation signals (e.g. OFDM m-QAM) in silicon microring resonators and silicon vertical slot waveguides; 2) we experimentally evaluate the on-chip analog signaling performance in silicon strip waveguides, silicon microring resonators and silicon photonic crystal cavities. On-chip terabit-scale digital signal transmission and low-distortion analog signal transmission are achieved in the experiment with favorable performance using silicon photonic devices.