Fiber Integrated Wavelength Converter Based on a Silicon Core Fiber With a Nano-Spike Coupler

An all-fiber integrated nonlinear silicon photonic wavelength converter has been proposed and fabricated using the silicon core fiber platform. The silicon fiber was spliced directly to a conventional single mode fiber, facilitated via an inverse tapered nano-spike that helped to reduce the mode mismatch between the different core materials. Four-wave mixing-based wavelength conversion with an efficiency as high as -22.1 dB has been achieved for selected wavelengths across the C-band in a device length of only ~ 1 cm. Successful conversion of quadrature phase-shift keying signals at a 20-Gb/s bitrate, with a 1 to 2 dB penalty level at the bit error ratio (BER) =3.8 × 10
^-3
, was used to demonstrate the suitability of the silicon fiber device for the construction of ultra-compact, all-fiber-based optical signal processing systems.