Photonic time-wavelength pulse interleaver on silicon

摘要

The time-wavelength optical pulse interleaver is an important component of a wavelength-interleaved photonic analog-to-digital converter (ADC). The two important performance indexes of interleavers are power imbalance and delay error. In order to reduce the power imbalance, a runway-shaped and shallow ridge silicon waveguide optical delay line (ODL) array is adopted. The measured average loss of the ODL is only 0.68 dB/cm. By measuring the delay of the ODL array, we optimize the ODL's length to reduce the interleaver's delay error. A four-channel interleaver with low loss and small delay error was fabricated on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform, and the power imbalance is 0.9 dB. The root mean square (RMS) delay error is 0.34% and the crosstalk is below -20.3 dB.