Transmission of 2.86 Tb/s data stream in silicon subwavelength grating waveguides

In this paper, we perform an investigation of terabit-scale data transmission in silicon subwavelength grating (SWG) waveguides for wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical signals. Silicon SWG waveguide is capable of decreasing the light confinement in silicon core by engineering the geometry, leading to relatively lower optical nonlinearity compared to silicon wire waveguide. We demonstrate ultrahigh-bandwidth 2.86 Tb/s data transmission through the fabricated 2-mm-long silicon SWG waveguide over a wide range of launch powers. In the experiment, 75 WDM channels are utilized with each carrying 38.12 Gb/s orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) signal. With the benefit of efficient reduction on optical nonlinearity, the optimum launch power is increased by 8 dB in SWG waveguide, indicating higher tolerance to the nonlinear impairments, compared to a silicon wire waveguide with identical length. With the optimum launch power, all 75 channels exhibit bit-error rate (BER) values less than 4e-5 after SWG waveguide transmission. We also evaluate the terabit-scale data transmission performance through four silicon SWG waveguides with different lengths (1 mm, 2 mm, 4 mm and 12 mm). The required optical signal-to-noise ratios (OSNRs) to achieve BER level of 1e-3 are around 15.27, 15.47, 16.66 and 20.38 dB, respectively.