APL Photonics (Apr 2017)

Wavelength conversion of QAM signals in a low loss CMOS compatible spiral waveguide

  • Francesco Da Ros,
  • Edson Porto da Silva,
  • Darko Zibar,
  • Sai T. Chu,
  • Brent E. Little,
  • Roberto Morandotti,
  • Michael Galili,
  • David J. Moss,
  • Leif K. Oxenløwe

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4978945
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2, no. 4
pp. 046105 – 046105-8

Abstract

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We demonstrate wavelength conversion of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals, including 32-GBd quadrature phase-shift keying and 10-GBd 16-QAM, in a 50-cm long high index doped glass spiral waveguide. The quality of the generated idlers for up to 20 nm of wavelength shift is sufficient to achieve a BER performance below the hard decision forward error correction threshold BER performance (<3.8 × 103), with an optical signal-to-noise ratio penalty of less than 0.3 dB compared to the original signal. Our results confirm that this is a promising platform for nonlinear optical signal processing, as a result of both very low linear propagation loss (<0.07 dB/cm) and a large material bandgap, which in turn ensures negligible nonlinear loss at telecom wavelengths.