Department of Photonics & Graduate Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering, College of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan.
Department of Photonics & Graduate Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering, College of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 8;23(2):711. doi: 10.3390/s23020711.
Silicon photonics (SiPh) are considered a promising technology for increasing interconnect speed and capacity while decreasing power consumption. Mode division multiplexing (MDM) enables signals to be transmitted in different orthogonal modes in a single waveguide core. Wideband MDM components simultaneously supporting wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) can significantly increase the transmission capacity for optical interconnects. In this work, we propose, fabricate and demonstrate a wideband and channel switchable MDM optical power divider on an SOI platform, supporting single, dual and triple modes. The switchable MDM power divider consists of two parts. The first part is a cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) for switching the data from their original TE, TE and TE modes to different modes among themselves. After the target modes are identified, mode up-conversion and Y-branch are utilized in the second part for the MDM power division. Here, 48 WDM wavelength channels carrying OFDM data are successfully switched and power divided. An aggregated capacity of 7.682 Tbit/s is achieved, satisfying the pre-forward error correction (pre-FEC) threshold (bit-error-rate, BER = 3.8 × 10). Although up to three MDM modes are presented in the proof-of-concept demonstration here, the proposed scheme can be scaled to higher order modes operation.
硅光子学（SiPh）被认为是一种很有前途的技术，可以提高互连速度和容量，同时降低功耗。模式复用（MDM）可以使信号在单波导芯中以不同的正交模式传输。同时支持波分复用（WDM）和正交频分复用（OFDM）的宽带 MDM 组件可以显著提高光互连的传输容量。在这项工作中，我们在 SOI 平台上提出、制作和演示了一种宽带和信道可切换的 MDM 光功率分配器，支持单模、双模和三模。可切换的 MDM 功率分配器由两部分组成。第一部分是级联马赫-曾德尔干涉仪（MZI），用于将数据从其原始 TE、TM 和 TE 模式切换到它们之间的不同模式。在确定目标模式后，第二部分利用模式上转换和 Y 分支进行 MDM 功率分配。这里，成功切换和功率分配了携带 OFDM 数据的 48 个 WDM 波长信道。实现了 7.682 Tbit/s 的聚合容量，满足了前向纠错（pre-FEC）阈值（误码率，BER = 3.8×10）。虽然这里的概念验证演示中展示了多达三种 MDM 模式，但所提出的方案可以扩展到更高阶模式的操作。
