Abdul Rahim

Expanding the Silicon Photonics Portfolio With Silicon Nitride Photonic Integrated Circuits

The high index contrast silicon-on-insulator platform is the dominant CMOS compatible platform for photonic integration. The successful use of silicon photonic chips in optical communication applications has now paved the way for new areas where photonic chips can be applied. It is already emerging as a competing technology for sensing and spectroscopic applications. This increasing range of applications for silicon photonics instigates an interest in exploring new materials, as silicon-on-insulator has some drawbacks for these emerging applications, e.g., silicon is not transparent in the visible wavelength range. Silicon nitride is an alternate material platform. It has moderately high index contrast, and like silicon-on-insulator, it uses CMOS processes to manufacture photonic integrated circuits. In this paper, the advantages and challenges associated with these two material platforms are discussed. The case of dispersive spectrometers, which are widely used in various silicon photonic applications, is presented for these two material platforms.

Silicon Photonic Implementation of a Scalable O-OFDM Demultiplexer

An easily scalable eight channel photonic integrated circuit to demultiplex an optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) symbol is presented. It is designed and fabricated using a silicon photonic platform. The measured filter response is in close agreement with the modeled results for an ideal device. Emulation using the measured response of the fabricated filter shows that the filter is capable of demultiplexing optical OFDM symbols comprising eight sub-carriers, each operating at 13.5 GBd.

Finite Impulse Response Filter Using 4-Port MMI Couplers for Residual Dispersion Compensation

Many implementations of optical finite impulse response filter for signal processing applications have been realized in integrated photonics using 2×2 couplers. We have implemented a filter using 4× 4 couplers. Such a filter is useful for the compensation of residual dispersion in a fiber optic transmission system. Silicon photonics realization using 4-port multimode interference couplers in 4 μm silicon-on-insulator technology has been carried out for a free spectral range of 100 GHz. The transmission and group delay for the fabricated device have been measured and a good agreement between the simulation and experimental results has been achieved. The proposed filter can compensate up to ±176 ps/nm of fiber chromatic dispersion.

Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits

The chapter covers fundamentals of Silicon Photonic ICs including the driving forces, basic physics, technological implementations, current state of the art, ongoing R&D and trends for future research. The treatment includes all relevant devices excluding Silicon Photonics based sources. The chapter comprises specific sections on wavelength selective devices such as delay-line based- and ring resonator-based spectral filters, and covers grating couplers, waveguide-integrated germanium photodetectors, and optical isolators as well. Nonlinear optic devices constitute a more advanced topic, and its coverage includes fundamental aspects and a number of corresponding devices including wavelength converters, all optical amplifiers, phase sensitive amplifiers, and a section on the design of complex Silicon Photonic ICs.

Highly scalable integrated discrete fourier transformation filter in silicon-on-insulator for next generation WDM systems

Summary form only given. The network traffic is estimated to be quadrupled by the year 2016 and will enter the “zettabyte” era. This ever increasing traffic demands more bandwidth and capacity in future from the long haul optical fiber transmission systems. The deployment of single carrier coherently detected 100 Gbps Polarization Multiplexed Quadrature Phase Shift Keying Wavelength Division Multiplexed (PM-QPSK WDM) systems is expected in the near future. Beyond that, the next generation 400 Gbps WDM systems are gaining lot of attention recently to sustain the traffic growth for the next years [1]. To make such systems spectrally efficient with low price per bit, multiple carrier Coherent Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (CO-OFDM) is considered as one of the most attractive options. It allows the packing of multiple PM-QPSK carriers in a super-channel delivering high data rates. An all-optical implementation of the CO-OFDM receiver for systems operating at 400Gbps and beyond leads to an energy efficient solution and overcomes the speed limits of electronics.The demultiplexing of spectrally overlapping OFDM sub-carriers requires the Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT) operation. A generalized schematic for a simple DFT filter for OFDM receiver is schematically shown in figure 1(a). This architecture allows the order R of the DFT filter to be increased by either increasing the order of the couplers or the number of stages N. In comparison to other integrated DFT approaches [2,3], this approach brings flexibility in filter scaling. Each stage of the filter is an MZI and performs the serial to parallel conversion and DFT operation. Various material platforms exist for the implementation of integrated optical circuits. One of them is Siliconon-Insulator (SOI) and is best known for its CMOS compatibility for mass production, energy efficiency, compact and high quality passive components. To emphasize the feasibility of our DFT filter architecture, we fabricated and characterized an 8 DFT filter in 4 μm SOI platform using a cascade of 2 and 4 port MZIs by employing 2 and 4 port Multimode Interference (MMI) couplers. The first stage of the fabricated filter has a 2port MZI with its outputs connected to the two 4-port MZIs in the second stage. The filter with 300 GHz Free Spectral Range (FSR) is designed to demultiplex 8 OFDM sub-carriers, that are QPSK modulated at 37.5 Gbaud resulting in an overall bit rate of 600 Gbps for each polarization. Figures 1(c) and 1(d) shows the filter transmission for TM and TE polarization. The performance of the filter is evaluated by using the measured filter response for an emulation performed in VPITransmissionMaker 8.7 for a 600 Gbps OFDM super-channel. All the channels have a Q value of more than 10 dB [4] to deliver a BER of 10-3. Figure 1(b) shows the constellation diagram obtained by demultiplexing one of the channels using the measurement result from the fabricated filter.

Compact FIR Filter Architecture for Tunable Optical Dispersion Compensation in Silicon Photonics

This paper presents the dispersion behavior of a 4-port asymmetric Mach-Zehnder-Interferometer, which can be used as a building block for a novel, compact and easy to control dispersion compensating filter.