Programmable Silicon Photonic Optical Thresholder

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an all-optical programmable thresholder on silicon photonics that enhances signal contrast and improves receiver sensitivity, utilizing nonlinear resonator-enhanced interferometry for optical signal discrimination.

Contribution

It introduces a novel silicon photonic optical thresholder leveraging nonlinearities in a resonator-enhanced MZI, with experimentally validated performance improvements.

Findings

Signal contrast enhancement of 40

Bit error rate improved by 5 orders of magnitude

Receiver sensitivity improved by 11 dB

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate an all-optical programmable thresholder on a silicon photonic circuit. By exploiting the nonlinearities in a resonator-enhanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), the proposed optical thresholder can discriminate two optical signals with very similar amplitudes. We experimentally achieve a signal contrast enhancement of 40, which leads to a bit error rate (BER) improvement by 5 orders of magnitude and a receiver sensitivity improvement of 11 dB. We present the thresholding function of our device and validate the function with experimental data. Furthermore, we investigate potential device speed improvement by reducing the carrier lifetime.