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Hybrid III-V-Silicon SOA in Optical Network Based On Advanced Modulation Formats
Hybrid III-V-Silicon SOA in Optical Network Based On Advanced Modulation Formats
Abstract— A hybrid III–V/silicon semiconductor optical the complexity of such systems. If the cost for assembly,
amplifier (SOA) is presented, which shows a maximum fiber- maintenance, and inventory of such systems can be drastically
to-fiber gain of 10 dB and a maximum internal gain around reduced by using hybrid integration, a wide range of innovative
28 ± 2 dB. The device was fabricated from III–V material
wafer-bonded onto a silicon-on-insulator wafer. The optical mode network setups will become commercially interesting.
transfers between silicon and III–V waveguides by means of In recent years, many types of hybrid III-V/silicon lasers
waveguide tapers. Vertical grating couplers are used to connect have been demonstrated [1]–[7], while the hybrid SOA has
the SOA to optical fibers. The device was packaged and tested received very little attention [8], [9]. However, in many
in a transmission experiment. In a loop configuration containing types of network applications, SOAs will play a crucial role,
25 km of single-mode fiber, the SOA amplifies data signals of
various modulation formats. Transmission with a bit error rate not only to compensate for accumulated losses, but also as
below the forward error correction limit is demonstrated for up functional devices such as remote modulators in colorless
to ten loops using QPSK, six loop using 8QAM, and four loops network units [10], optical gates for packet switching [11],
using 16QAM. nonlinear elements for wavelength conversion [12], or
Index Terms— Semiconductor optical amplifiers, photonic broadband sources [13].
integrated circuits, hybrid integration, wafer bonding, silicon-on- In the present article, we first give the static performance of
insulator, III-V semiconductor materials, optical fiber networks,
advanced modulation formats.
a hybrid III-V/silicon SOA that we have previously presented
in [14], and then we focus on the potential benefits of SOAs
I. I NTRODUCTION for in-line amplification in a context of metropolitan optical
networks using QPSK, 8-QAM and 16-QAM modulation
S ILICON-BASED photonic integrated circuits (PIC) with
integrated light sources and amplifiers are a promising
prospect for many applications in optical communication net-
formats. We demonstrate up to 10 cascaded nodes separated
by 25 km of single-mode fiber (SMF) and study the impact
works. Hybrid III-V/silicon lasers and semiconductor optical of the non-linear penalty as well as the noise accumulation
amplifiers (SOA) can be integrated in complex PICs and induced by the device.
potentially replace discrete components that are nowadays put
together in expensive assembly procedures to build network
II. SOA D ESIGN AND S TATIC P ERFORMANCE
equipment for current optical networks. Moreover, advanced
network designs using wavelength division multiplex- All results reported here are obtained from a hybrid III-V/
ing (WDM) and advanced modulation formats are conquer- silicon SOA that was fabricated using molecular wafer bond-
ing the markets at ever shorter transmission ranges, despite ing of III-V quantum well (QW) material on a patterned
and planarized silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. III-V wave-
Manuscript received May 9, 2015; revised July 29, 2015; accepted
August 7, 2015. Date of publication August 11, 2015; date of current version guides were formed after bonding, and standard 405 nm h-line
September 30, 2015. This work was supported in part by the European FP7 photolithography was used to align them to the underlying
Projects Fabulous under Contract 318704 and in part by the Hyssop under silicon waveguides. Lasers obtained from the same fabrication
Contract 328364.
P. Kaspar, R. Brenot, A. Accard, D. Make, F. Lelarge, and process have been reported in previous publications [2].
G.-H. Duan are with the III–V Laboratory, Palaiseau F-91767, France Transitions between active and passive sections of the
(e-mail: guanghua.duan@3-5lab.fr). hybrid SOA are made using tapered waveguides that force the
G. de Valicourt, M. A. Mestre, and P. Jennevé are with the Centre
de Villarceaux, WDM Dynamic Networks Department, Bell Laboratories, optical mode to transfer from silicon to III-V material and vice
Nozay 91620, France (e-mail: guilhem.de_valicourt@alcatel-lucent.com). versa (cf. Fig. 1) [2]. In the active section, the mode overlap
N. Pavarelli, M. Rensing, C. Eason, and P. O’Brien are with with the QWs is close to 10%. The active section of the SOA
the Tyndall National Institute, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
(e-mail: peter.obrien@tyndall.ie). is around 1.1 mm long. The coupling loss at the active/passive
S. Olivier, S. Malhouitre, C. Kopp, C. Jany, and S. Menezo are with interface is potentially very low [2]. Another major advantage
CEA–Leti, Grenoble 38054, France (e-mail: segolene.olivier@cea.fr). of hybrid integration of SOAs using bonded active material
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. and tapered waveguides is the easy alignment of active and
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2015.2466543 passive waveguides (using standard photo-lithography). In
1041-1135 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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2384 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 27, NO. 22, NOVEMBER 15, 2015
Fig. 2. SOA saturation power for various currents applied to the SOA.
Fig. 1. Top and cross-sectional views of the taper structure for mode transfer The 3dB-saturation power is given at the fiber input, input silicon waveguide,
between III-V and silicon waveguides of the hybrid SOA. Simulated mode output silicon waveguide, and output fiber.
profiles are given for three exemplary cross-sections.
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KASPAR et al.: HYBRID III–V/SILICON SOA IN OPTICAL NETWORK 2385
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2386 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 27, NO. 22, NOVEMBER 15, 2015
IV. C ONCLUSION
We presented a hybrid III-V/silicon SOA, packaged
into a modified butterfly package, with up to 10 dB of
fiber-to-fiber gain (28 dB of internal gain). The performance
of the SOA was tested in a recirculating loop configuration
that emulates an optical network with several nodes, each
comprising the same hybrid SOA. The advanced modulation
formats QPSK, 8-QAM, and 16-QAM were used to study the
transmission behavior. A maximum number of 10, 6, and 3
passes was observed for the different formats in order of
increasing modulation complexity. Our result is a very promis-
ing solution towards a fully hybrid photonic integrated circuit
Fig. 8. Constellation diagrams for QPSK (left), 8QAM (center), and for applications such as inline amplification, optical packet
16QAM (right) transmission for zero passages (top row) and maximum
number of passages (bottom row) through the SOA. switching, multi-mode and multi-core amplification in high
bit rate optical networks. Significant improvements can be
expected if the coupling loss is reduced and the saturation
the input power at the fiber connector of the packaged SOA.
power is increased.
As noted in the previous section, there are two operation
regimes that can be distinguished in the Q(Pin ) characteristics. R EFERENCES
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