Silicon-on-Insulator Nanowire Resonators for Compact and Ultra-High Speed All-Optical Wavelength Converters

We present the development of application-specific silicon-on-insulator SOI nanowire ring and racetrack resonators designed to assist semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-based all-optical wavelength conversion. We demonstrate the fabrication of fix resonance racetrack resonators exhibiting coupling gaps as low as 160 nm and tunable ring resonators with coupling gaps <; 90 nm. The resonators are cascaded after commercial 40 Gb/s SOAs to realize chirp filtering of the optical data signals through high-resolution spectral sampling. We experimentally demonstrate inverted and non-inverted SOI resonator-assisted all-optical wavelength conversion at 40 Gb/s and 160 Gb/s with power penalties <; 3 dB.