Low-power-penalty wavelength multicasting for 36  Gbit/s 16-QAM coherent optical signals in a silicon waveguide

All-optical wavelength multicasting has been experimentally demonstrated for 36 Gbit/s 16-quadrature amplitude modulation signals based on four-wave mixing processes in a silicon waveguide with multiple pumps. In our experiment, dual pumps are injected together with the signal into the waveguide and nine idlers are generated, involving five wavelength multicasting channels. Coherent detection and advanced digital signal processing are employed, and the recovered constellation diagrams of the multicasting idlers show a root-mean-square error vector magnitude degradation as small as 2.74%. The bit error rate (BER) results are measured for these multicasting idlers, and the power penalties are all lower than 0.96 dB at the BER of 3.8×10(-3) (corresponding to the forward error correction threshold).