Review on optical nonlinearity of group-IV semiconducting materials for all-optical processing

Abstract

Group-IV semiconductor compounds with intense optical nonlinearity have emerged as a new branch of all-optical processing materials benefiting from the manufacturing compatibility with silicon electronic and photonic integrated circuits. Owing to the chemical reforming on the bonding or precipitating feature of the compositional atoms in the membrane matrix, either the orbital hybridization or the quantum self-assembly of interstitial composites can be employed to reform the electronic and optical characteristics. The recent development on enhancing the nonlinear refractive indices of the group-IV semiconductor materials has revealed significant progress to accelerate the all-optical switching logic, which reduces the energy consumption to enable the constitution of the advanced multi-logic gating and the entry-level photonic computing circuits. This work not only overviews the Group-IV semiconductor photonic data processing elements but also prospects for the future direction of optical quantum computation and communication. To date, the nonlinear refractive indices of the group-IV semiconductor materials can be obtained as 10-8-10-16 cm2/W in the range between 300 nm to 10000 nm in 2022. The wavelength conversion and data switching with bit rate beyond 25 Gbps have been achieved via nonlinear photonic waveguide components. By taking the SiC-made micro-ring waveguide as an example, the n2 as high as 3.05×10-14 cm2/W of the resonant SiC micro-ring gate is retrieved from the pump-probe analysis. All-optical data processing including both wavelength switching and format conversion in the highly nonlinear optical SiC waveguide resonator can achieve error-free operation with corresponding bit-error-ratios of lower than 1×10-5 at 25 Gbps after forward error correction.

Nonlinear Optical SiC:C Microring for an ASK-to-PSK Gate and NOT + XOR Logic beyond 10 Gbit/s

“…Owing to the mature technology of silicon-based semiconductor processing, the silicon photonic devices with the high modulation speed, low consumption, or broad linewidth have been developed over decades for next-generation optical interconnect communication. − For future integrated circuits, the optical waveguide that handles high data rates with low power consumption is the alternative to replace the electric cable with a finite bandwidth-length product. For long-distance communication, the silicon photonic platforms also play important roles in breakthrough advantages beyond 50 Gbit/s per channel. − Versatile fundamental integrated on-chip devices including optical switches, − modulators, − filters, − and detectors − have been demonstrated for future development. Most works used the electrical-to-optical mechanism to achieve high-speed modulation.…”