Optical wavelength conversion of high bandwidth phase-encoded signals in a high FOM 50cm CMOS compatible waveguide

Abstract

We demonstrate wavelength conversion of QAM signals including 32GBd QPSK and 10GBd 16QAM in a 50cm long high index doped glass spiral waveguide. The quality of the generated idlers over a 10nm bandwidth is sufficient to achieve a BER performance below the HD FEC threshold (less than 3.8 x 10-3), with an OSNR 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, a result of both very low linear propagation loss (less than 0.07 dB/cm) and the large material bandgap that ensures negligible nonlinear loss at telecom wavelengths.