Clock-pump four-wave-mixing-based multichannel all-optical regeneration in silicon waveguide

摘要

The nonlinear propagation characteristics of multiwavelength optical signals in silicon waveguides are investigated for all-optical regeneration. Our experiment and simulation show that the multiwavelength regenerators based on silicon waveguides can be developed with a clock-pump scheme by properly setting the signal and pump power levels, ensuring that the Q-factor degradation induced by the Kerr nonlinear cross talk of the input signals is <1.0 dB and the clock-pump power is no more than the saturated input level related to the nonlinear loss. A three-wavelength regeneration experiment based on the clock-pump four-wave-mixing scheme was demonstrated in the silicon nanowire waveguide, and both the extinction ratio and O-factor are improved by >3.0 dB for 12.5 Gbit/s on-off keying signals. The feasibility of an eight-wavelength regeneration with the clock pump is also verified by simulation.