One-way transmission of 10 Gbps data through a silicon optical diode based on nonreciprocal resonance reshaping

The reduced optical bandwidth associated with resonance enhancement poses a significant challenge for resonators to process wide-bandwidth optical data. We report one-way transmission of 10 giga-bit-per-second optical data through a silicon optical diode based on both the resonance-enhanced optical nonlinear effects and resonance reshaping. The diode is operated with a forward-only or backward-only input. In the backward direction, the diode corrupts the data through the strong dispersion and attenuation associated with the resonance of a microring. In the forward direction, the data pass through the diode with negligible distortions because the resonance is red-shifted from the carrier wavelength. In this experimental context the finite bandwidth associated with the optical resonance may be considered beneficial, since the phase response makes an additional contribution to transmission nonreciprocity beyond what is seen with unmodulated light.