Photonic Integrated Self-Coherent Homodyne Receiver Without Optical Polarization Control for Polarization-Multiplexing Short-Reach Optical Interconnects

Abstract

Standard coherent communication technology is being introduced to short-reach optical communications to further scale the link throughput by leveraging more degrees of freedom of an optical channel. However, the cost, footprint, and power consumption of the coherent transceivers may impede its application to short-reach optical interconnects. Silicon photonics technology has realized the monolithic integration of various optoelectronic components for coherent transceivers on a single chip to lower the cost but except for a silicon laser. Heterogeneous integration has been developed to realize distributed feedback (DFB) laser sources, which are not well suited for standard coherent communicat..