Breakthrough switching speed with an all-optical chalcogenide glass chip: 640 Gbit/s demultiplexing

New CMOS-compatible platforms based on silicon nitride and Hydex for nonlinear optics

“…All-optical signal generation and processing [1,2] have been highly successful at enabling a vast array of capabilities, such as switching and de-multiplexing of signals at unprecedented speeds [3,4], parametric gain [5] on a chip, Raman lasing [6], wavelength conversion [7], optical logic [8], all-optical regeneration [9,10], radio-frequency (RF) spectrometry at THz speeds [11,12], as well as entirely new functions such as ultra-short pulse measurement [13,14] and generation [15] on a chip, optical temporal cloaking [16], and many others. Phase sensitive functions [14,17], in particular, will likely be critical for telecommunications systems that are already using phase encoding schemes [18,19].…”

CMOS compatible integrated all-optical radio frequency spectrum analyzer

“…Nonlinear integrated photonics has recently provided powerful all-optical tools to overcome the speed limitation of electronics [6][7][8][9][10][11]. A key breakthrough was the scheme for an all-optical RF-spectrum analyzer, introduced by Dorrer and Maywar [12] that exploits optical mixing between a signal under test and a CW probe, via the Kerr (n 2 ) nonlinearity in highly nonlinear fibers or integrated waveguides.…”

Terabit/s serial optical communications (invited)

“…An alternative to HNLF is the very non-linear chalcogenide waveguides. In [17] we showed that such a device could be used to demultiplex a 640 Gbit/s data signal, and as with the HNLF and the PPLN, the active effect used for the optical signal processing is ultrafast, and the only speed limitation lies in the design of the dispersion (this goes for all the devices). Recently, in [18], it was shown that these waveguides indeed have a THz response with a modulation bandwidth on the order of 2.…”