First Demonstration of a 10-Gb/s RZ End-to-End Four-Wave-Mixing Based Link at 1884 nm Using Silicon Nanowaveguides

We demonstrate a double-stage four-wave mixing (FWM) scheme in silicon nanowaveguides which allows effective optical time-division-multiplexed data generation and reception in the 2-μm region. The scheme is based on a first mixing stage which unicasts a high-speed return-to-zero stream from the C-band to 1884-nm, followed by a second mixing stage which wavelength converts the data from 1884-nm down to the O-band for detection. The 10-Gb/s data traverses an aggregate record distance of 909 nm in the cascaded wavelength-conversion and unicast stages, with a power penalty of 2.5 dB. This scheme effectively overcomes the lack of commercially-available high-performance sources and receivers at 2 μm by relying on telecommunication band components along with ultrabroad FWM silicon devices.