A fast silicon-graphene hybrid plasmonic waveguide photodetectors beyond 1.55 μm is proposed and realized by introducing an ultra-thin wide silicon-on-insulator ridge core region with a narrow metal cap. With this novel design, the light absorption in graphene is enhanced while the metal absorption loss is reduced simultaneously, which helps greatly improve the responsivity as well as shorten the absorption region for achieving fast responses. Furthermore, metal-graphenemetal sandwiched electrodes are introduced to reduce the metal-graphene contact resistance, which is also helpful for improving the response speed. When the photodetector operates at 2 μm, the measured 3dB-bandwidth is >20 GHz (which is limited by the experimental setup) while the 3dB-bandwith calculated from the equivalent circuit with the parameters extracted from the measured S 11 is as high as ~100 GHz. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to report the waveguide photodetector at 2 μm with a 3dB-bandwidth over 20 GHz. Besides, the present photodetectors also work very well at 1.55 μm. The measured responsivity is about 0.4 A/W under a bias voltage of −0.3 V for an optical power of 0.16 mW, while the measured 3dB-bandwidth is over 40 GHz (limited by the test setup) and the 3 dB-bandwidth estimated from the equivalent circuit is also as high as ~100 GHz, which is one of the best results reported for silicon-graphene photodetectors at 1.55 μm.

We demonstrate a thermally tunable four-channel add/drop demultiplexer based on silicon grating-assisted contra-directional couplers (contra-DCs) for 200 GHz dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) systems. In order to obtain the narrow bandwidth and the rapid roll-off necessary for the DWDM, every wavelength channel is filtered dually by two identical contra-DCs cascaded in parallel. In addition, the phase apodization technique is utilized to suppress sidelobes. With these special designs, passbands of the four drop ports exhibit 3 and 20 dB bandwidths of 0.4 and 0.8 nm, respectively, while isolation between adjacent channels is better than 20 dB. Insertion losses at through and drop ports are 0.6 and ∼2.6 dB, respectively. The maximal wavelength-tunable range is up to 25 nm.

One-dimensional polarization-independent grating couplers are demonstrated with the aid of the adaptive genetic algorithm optimization. By adjusting the relative weight between the coupling efficiency and the bandwidth of the polarization-dependent loss (PDL), we control the evolution direction and customize the final performance of the device. Two specific designs are generated by giving more weight to the coupling efficiency and the PDL bandwidth, respectively. Coupling efficiencies of the first design are measured to be − 7.6 d B and − 7.9 d B at 1550 nm for TE and TM polarizations, respectively, while its 1.0 dB PDL bandwidth is 25.0 nm. In contrast, the second design presents higher coupling efficiencies of − 7.6 d B and − 7.2 d B at 1550 nm for TE and TM polarizations, respectively. However, its 1.0 dB PDL bandwidth is 22.0 nm.

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