Demonstration of terabit-scale data transmission in silicon vertical slot waveguides.

We design and fabricate silicon vertical slot waveguides for terabit-scale data transmission. The designed silicon photonic device is composed of apodized grating couplers, strip waveguides, strip-to-slot/slot-to-strip mode converters, and slot waveguide. Tight light confinement in the nano-scale air slot region is achieved in the silicon vertical slot waveguide which features relatively lower nonlinearity compared to silicon strip waveguide. Using the fabricated silicon photonic devices, we first demonstrate ultra-wide bandwidth 1.8-Tbit/s data transmission through a 2-mm-long silicon vertical slot waveguide using 161 wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) channels each carrying 11.2-Gbit/s orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) signal. All 161 WDM channels achieve bit-error rate (BER) less than 1e-3 after on-chip data transmission. We further demonstrate terabit-scale data transmission through four silicon vertical slot waveguides with different lengths (1 mm, 2 mm, 3.1 mm, 12.2 mm). The optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) penalties of data transmission through four silicon vertical slot waveguides are 1, 2, 3.2 and 4.5 dB at a BER of 1e-3, respectively. The obtained results indicate that the presented silicon vertical slot waveguide might be an alternative promising candidate facilitating chip-scale high-speed optical interconnections.