Abstract
A silicon photonic tunable optical dispersion compensator (TODC) is demonstrated based on a series of 5 thermally tunable Mach- Zehnder interferometers. The TODC has a 2.8mm x 5.0 mm foot-print with continuously tunable dispersion from 0ps/nm to 2000ps/nm with a low tuning power of 80mW. This TODC is used to extend the reach of a 10Gb/s link from 85km to 150km.
Highlights
The reach of an optical communication link is fundamentally determined by its loss and chromatic dispersion
Dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) is the most common form of dispersion management used in optical communication systems today due to its wide operating bandwidth
DCFs have the drawback of high loss, the ability to compensate only for fixed amount of fiber dispersion and do not compensate exactly over their entire bandwidth for the dispersion slope resulting in a residual dispersion towards the edges of a DWDM system
Summary
The reach of an optical communication link is fundamentally determined by its loss and chromatic dispersion. Planar optical dispersion compensators (ODC) have been demonstrated in many different device architectures, mainly fabricated from silica glass These include wide [6] and narrow [7] bandwidth tunable Bragg gratings, cascaded etalons [8] and planar waveguide based devices [9,10,11,12,13]. The benefits of this type of ODC are that they are tunable, both in terms of wavelength and dispersion value, and can be implemented on a per channel basis similar to EDC chips easing the upgradeability of existing optical networks. This TODC device epitomizes the strengths of silicon photonics in that it has a 50x smaller footprint, and 5x lower tuning power compared to similar devices fabricated from silica [12, 13]
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