Spectrally Efficient Integrated Silicon Photonic Phase‐Diverse DD Receiver with Near‐Ideal Phase Response for C‐Band DWDM Transmission

Abstract

In this paper, a spectrally efficient silicon photonics phase‐diverse direct‐detection receiver based on asymmetric self‐coherent detection is proposed. The receiver is hardware efficient and composed of only two photodiodes and two analog‐to‐digital channels to accurately recover complex double‐sideband signals by leveraging an optimized integrated silicon racetrack resonator with near‐ideal phase responses. Moreover, the periodicity of the resonator response enables the receiver to support multi‐channel transmission such as dense wavelength‐division multiplexing. The receiver circuit is fabricated and characterized. In 40‐km transmission experiments, a record net electrical spectral efficiency of 7.10 bit s−1 Hz−1 per wavelength and per polarization is achieved, where a net 208‐Gb s−1 32QAM transmission is demonstrated using 29.3‐GHz electrical bandwidth. Furthermore, the receiver achieves net 220‐Gb s−1 16QAM transmissions in 14 channels from 1527 to 1550 nm with 205‐GHz spacing, and a maximum 240‐Gb s−1 net capacity at a single channel. Such a performance is reached with only standard coherent digital signal processing stacks including all‐linear equalization.