To keep pace with the demands in optical communications, electro-optic modulators should feature large bandwidths, operate across all telecommunication windows, offer a small footprint, and allow for CMOS-compatible fabrication to keep costs low(1). Here, we demonstrate a new ultra-compact plasmonic phase modulator based on the Pockels effect in a nonlinear polymer. The device has a length of only 29 mu m and operates at 40 Gbit s(-1). Its modulation frequency response is flat up to 65 GHz and beyond. The modulator has been tested to work across a 120-nm-wide wavelength range centred at 1,550 nm, and is expected to work beyond this range. Its operation has been verified for temperatures up to 85 degrees C and it is easy to fabricate. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most compact high-speed phase modulator demonstrated to date
A practical scheme to perform the fast Fourier transform in the optical domain is introduced. Optical real-time FFT signal processing is performed at speeds far beyond the limits of electronic digital processing, and with negligible energy consumption. To illustrate the power of the method we demonstrate an optical 400 Gbit/s OFDM receiver. It performs an optical real-time FFT on the consolidated OFDM data stream, thereby demultiplexing the signal into lower bit rate subcarrier tributaries, which can then be processed electronically.
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