Inter-polarization mixers for coherent detection of optical signals

• DOI: 10.1364/oe.26.018523
• Publication Date: 2018-07-05T22:03:14Z
• Authors: Argishti Melikyan; Kwangwoong Kim; Nicolas Fontaine; Sethumadhavan Cha...; Young-Kai Chen; Po Dong
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Electro-magnetic (EM) mixers are fundamental building blocks in communication systems. They used frequency/wavelength filters, interferometric modulators, amplitude-phase receivers, to name a few. Traditional EM have two or more input ports and work only for co-polarized signal local-oscillator (LO) incident on its inputs. Here we report novel designs, silicon, of inter-polarization operating at 1550 nm wavelength. The 180-degree optical mixer comprising single port is demonstrated coherently mix orthogonally polarized LO. Using the proposed mixer, design 90-degree silicon with small footprint, broadband response, low loss good fabrication tolerance. It exploits birefringence waveguide achieve fabrication-tolerant 90° phase difference between signal/LO relative in-phase quadrature components. A monolithic photonics coherent receiver using reported operation 22 Gbaud 44 shown. These pave way architectures long-haul, metro, passive networks data-center interconnect applications.