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Multi-carrier Tb/s silicon photonic coherent receiver

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Abstract

We propose a silicon polarization-diversity coherent receiver for wavelength-multiplexing transmission without using the large-footprint arrayed waveguide grating (AWG). We have integrated our proposed coherent receiver on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform for high-capacity transmission. In the proposed coherent receiver, high-frequency photocurrent signals from other wavelengths are suppressed by electrical low-pass filters. Moreover, the signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) generated from each wavelength is eliminated by the balanced detection. These two features lend to the proposed coherent receiver being free of the mm-scale AWG. We have demonstrated our proposed coherent receiver to detect a 1.12-Tb/s wavelength-division-multiplexed and polarization-division-multiplexed 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (PDM-16-QAM) signal. The compact footprint of the silicon chip promises small-form-factor receivers for future ultra-high-capacity coherent communication systems that require a high integration level and low fabrication cost.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2019YFB1803602) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61835008, 61860206001, 61975115).

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Correspondence to Yikai Su.

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Wang, Z., Li, X., Li, J. et al. Multi-carrier Tb/s silicon photonic coherent receiver. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 67, 112405 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-022-3742-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-022-3742-2

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