Arbitrarily routed mode-division multiplexed photonic circuits for dense integration

Abstract

Mode-division multiplexing (MDM) is becoming an enabling technique for large-capacity data communications via encoding the information on orthogonal guiding modes. However, the on-chip routing of a multimode waveguide occupies too large chip area due to the constraints on inter-mode cross talk and mode leakage. Very recently, many efforts have been made to shrink the footprint of individual element like bending and crossing, but the devices still occupy >10x10 um2 footprint for three-mode multiplexed signals and the high-speed signal transmission has not been demonstrated yet. In this work, we demonstrate the first MDM circuits based on digitized meta-structures which have extremely compact footprints. The radius for a three-mode bending is only 3.9 μm and the footprint of a crossing is only 8x8um2. The 3x100 Gbit/s mode-multiplexed signals are arbitrarily routed through the circuits consists of many sharp bends and compact crossing with a bit error rate under forward error correction limit. This work is a significant step towards the large-scale and dense integration of MDM photonic integrated circuits.

References in corpus (7)

• Inverse design and demonstration of a compact and broadband on-chip wavelength demultiplexer
• Nonreciprocal Inter-band Brillouin Modulation
• Inverse Design of Near Unity Efficiency Perfectly Vertical Grating Couplers
• All passive photonic power divider with arbitrary split ratio
• On-chip Inter-modal Brillouin Scattering
• On-chip coherent conversion of photonic quantum signals between different degrees of freedom
• On-chip transverse-mode entangled photon pair source

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Analysis of silicon nitride partial Euler waveguide bends
• Metasurface-dressed two-dimensional on-chip waveguide for free-space light field manipulation
• Transverse mode-encoded quantum gate on a silicon photonic chip
• Low-Loss and Low-Power Silicon Ring Based WDM 32$\times$100 GHz Filter Enabled by a Novel Bend Design
• Phonon-induced anomalous gauge potential for photonic isolation in frequency space