WDM-compatible mode-division multiplexing on a silicon chip

Lian-Wee Luo; Noam Ophir; Christine P Chen; Lucas H Gabrielli; Carl B Poitras; Keren Bergmen; Michal Lipson

doi:10.1038/ncomms4069

WDM-compatible mode-division multiplexing on a silicon chip

Nat Commun. 2014:5:3069. doi: 10.1038/ncomms4069.

Authors

Lian-Wee Luo¹, Noam Ophir², Christine P Chen³, Lucas H Gabrielli⁴, Carl B Poitras⁴, Keren Bergmen³, Michal Lipson⁵

Affiliations

¹ 1] School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, 428 Phillips Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA [2].
² 1] Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, 500 West 120th Street, New York, New York 10027, USA [2].
³ Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, 500 West 120th Street, New York, New York 10027, USA.
⁴ School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, 428 Phillips Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.
⁵ 1] School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, 428 Phillips Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA [2] Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science, Cornell University, 420 Physical Sciences Building, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.

PMID: 24423882
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4069

Abstract

Significant effort in optical-fibre research has been put in recent years into realizing mode-division multiplexing (MDM) in conjunction with wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) to enable further scaling of the communication bandwidth per fibre. In contrast, almost all integrated photonics operate exclusively in the single-mode regime. MDM is rarely considered for integrated photonics because of the difficulty in coupling selectively to high-order modes, which usually results in high inter-modal crosstalk. Here we show the first microring-based demonstration of on-chip WDM-compatible mode-division multiplexing with low modal crosstalk and loss. Our approach can potentially increase the aggregate data rate by many times for on-chip ultrahigh bandwidth communications.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.