Silicon photonics has great potential for mid-wave-infrared applications. The dispersion of waveguide can be manipulated by waveguide dimension and cladding materials. Simulation shows that <3 μm wide conversion can be achieved by tuning the pump wavelength.

We demonstrate a novel broadband pulse compression and modelocking scheme by using two-photon absorption in silicon waveguides. Experimentally we obtain greater than 20 fold pulse compression and 200 ps modelocked pulses. The free carrier lifetime and the width of the modulation signal are found to be two critical parameters affecting the output pulse width. Theoretical calculations indicate that optical pulses of less than 20 ps width are achievable by using the same technique.

We demonstrate a novel broadband pulse compression and modelocking scheme by using two-photon absorption in silicon waveguides. Experimentally we obtain greater than 20 fold pulse compression and 200ps modelocked pulses. The free carrier lifetime and the width of the modulation signal are found to be two critical parameters affecting the output pulse width. Theoretical calculations indicate that optical pulses of less than 20ps width are achievable by using the same technique.

An ultra-broadband wavelength conversion is presented and experimentally demonstrated based on nondegenerate four-wave mixing in silicon waveguides. Two idlers can be generated and their wavelengths can be freely tuned by using two pumps where the first pump is set close to the signal and the second pump is wavelength tunable. Using this scheme, a small phase-mismatch and hence an ultra-broad conversion bandwidth is realized in spite of the waveguide dispersion profile. We show that the experimental demonstrations are consistent with the theoretical estimations. Total conversion bandwidth is estimated to reach >500 nm and it can provide a feasible approach to realize one-to-two wavelength conversion among different telecommunication bands between 1300 nm and 1800 nm.

Based on the high nonlinearity of the chip-scale silicon waveguide with small dispersion, a compact frequency-resolved optical gating system has been demonstrated using cross phase modulation for ultrafast pulse characterization. The principal component generalized projections algorithm is used to retrieve the amplitude and phase from the spectrogram. Amplitude and phase of a 540 fs pulse have been measured. The measured amplitude result is confirmed by the autocorrelation measurement.