Optical data exchange of m-QAM signals using a silicon-organic hybrid slot waveguide: proposal and simulation.

We present modulation-format-transparent data exchange for m-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (m-QAM) signals using a single silicon-organic hybrid slot waveguide which offers tight light confinement and enhanced nonlinearity. By exploiting the parametric depletion effect of non-degenerate four-wave mixing (ND-FWM) process in the slot waveguide, we simulate low-power (<10 mW) ultrahigh-speed optical data exchange of 640 Gbaud (2.56 Tbit/s) optical time-division multiplexed (OTDM) 16-QAM and 640 Gbaud (3.84 Tbit/s) OTDM 64-QAM signals and characterize the operation performance in terms of error vector magnitude (EVM) and bit-error rate (BER). The calculated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) penalties of data exchange are negligible for 2.56 Tbit/s 16-QAM signals and less than 2 dB for 3.84 Tbit/s 64-QAM signals at a BER of 2e-3. For a given pump power of 9 mW, the operation performance dependence on the waveguide length is studied, showing an optimized waveguide length of ~17 mm. For a given waveguide length of 17 mm, the SNR penalty of data exchange, at a BER of 2e-3, is kept below 4 dB when varying input pump power from 8.4 to 9.8 mW for 2.56 Tbit/s 16-QAM and from 8.9 to 9.2 mW for 3.84 Tbit/s 64-QAM. In addition, data exchange running at low speed (e.g. 20 Gbaud) and data exchange taking into account waveguide propagation loss are also analyzed with favorable operation performance.