Ultracompact 160 Gbaud all-optical demultiplexing exploiting slow light in an engineered silicon photonic crystal waveguide

Abstract

We demonstrate all-optical demultiplexing of a high-bandwidth, time-division multiplexed 160 Gbit/s signal to 10 Gbit/s channels, exploiting slow light enhanced four-wave mixing in a dispersion engineered, 96 μm long planar photonic crystal waveguide. We report error-free (bit error rate<10⁻⁹) operation of all 16 demultiplexed channels, with a power penalty of 2.2-2.4 dB, highlighting the potential of these structures as a platform for ultracompact all-optical nonlinear processes.