Broadband Wavelength Conversion for Hybrid Multiplexing Signals Based on a Parallel Dispersion-Engineered Silicon Waveguide

Broadband all-optical wavelength conversion (AOWC) for hybrid wavelength- and mode-division multiplexing (WDM-MDM) signals is experimentally demonstrated based on degenerate four-wave mixing in a silicon chip with a parallel dispersion-optimized multimode nonlinear waveguide and mode (de)multiplexers.

By simultaneously coupling two modes into the waveguide using an optical fiber array, the intermodal crosstalk is measured to be as low as -25.9 dB for the fundamental mode of the transverse electric mode (TE0) (or -23.6 dB for the first-order mode TE1), and the conversion efficiency is -25.4 dB for TE0 (or -26.3 dB for TE1) mode.

A wide conversion bandwidth of ∼68 nm is measured except for the influence of the crosstalk, which is the first time to experimentally demonstrate the broadband wavelength conversion for MDM signal. Using a 4 × 10 Gbit/s on-off keying (OOK) hybrid WDM-MDM signal, four AOWC channels are obtained on the idlers and the power penalty of each channel is less than 2.7 dB at the bit-error-ratio of 1 × 10-9.