Fabrication and experimental demonstration of the first 160 Gb/s hybrid silicon-on-insulator integrated all-optical wavelength converter

We present a hybrid integrated photonic circuit on a silicon-on-insulator substrate that performs ultra high-speed all-optical wavelength conversion. The chip incorporates a 1.25 mm non-linear SOA mounted on the SOI board using gold-tin bumps as small as 14 μm. Τhe device performs chirp filtering and signal polarity inversion with two multi-mode interference (MMI) - based cascaded delay interferometers (DIs) monolithically integrated on the same SOI substrate. Full free spectral range (FSR) tuning of the DIs is accomplished by two independently tuneable on-chip thermal heaters. We demonstrate 160Gb/s all-optical wavelength conversion with power penalties of less than 4.6dB.