Efficient communication at telecom wavelengths using wavelength conversion and silicon photon-counting detectors

摘要

Silicon Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes (Si GM-APDs) have desirable properties for an optical photon-counting receiver, including high single-photon detection efficiency, low reset time, and low timing jitter; however, they do not detect near-IR photons. In this work, we demonstrated a sensitive photon-counting receiver in the near-IR by combining a wavelength converter consisting of a periodically-poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide and a commercial Si GM-APD detector. We measured a receiver sensitivity from 1.4 to 3.5 incident photons/bit from 5.5 Mb/s to 22 Mb/s for a single detector, and achieved a sensitivity of 4 photons/bit at 78 Mb/s using an emulated array of 25 detectors.