How to build a more high-speed and more optimized Internet? How to make passive components can be further integrated? Professor Shi Wei from Laval University in Quebec City, Canada, gives his own answer with his newly designed dimmable filter.
Professor Shi points out that energy consumption and the cost of each optical device prevent the realization of a higher-speed Internet. The tunable optical filters he and his team design have greatly reduced the cost and power consumption of optical networks due to their integration into photonic chips.
The tunable filter performance can be compared to the traditional tunable filter, but the size and cost is only a fraction of the original. The tunable range of the device is claimed to be the widest of the tunable filters exhibited on silicon chips in the past. In addition, the device has an almost unlimited range of free spectrum, meaning it can work in any frequency range. In addition, the device has very low insertion loss and in-band fluctuation, low crosstalk and low delay characteristics.
The device uses more than 1000 times the width of human hair than the periodic nanostructures to achieve spectral. Wavelength tuning is based on silicon micro-heaters to change the nano-structure. The entire device is implemented on a CMOS-compatible nano-photon platform, ensuring low cost.
Professor Shi said, "The most exciting of all this is done on the silicon photonics platform, which signals that this filter can be integrated with other devices as if it were a lost piece of jigsaw puzzle."
Tunable filters are important optical devices in optical network design. Because spectral resources are limited and bandwidth is allocated flexibly, it is important to allocate bandwidth to a given user at a given time. Tunable filters are the key components for a flexible optical network.
The integrative tunable filter developed by Professor Shi and his team has an adjustable frequency range of 670GHz, which is significantly higher than the 100GHz bandwidth of other silicon photonic integrated tunable filters. In the future, Professor Shi said that it can be further extended to the tunable range of 1THz.
Professor Shi said that "large-capacity optical networks will revolutionize human life, and the next generation of Internet technologies will mean huge amounts of data transfer." Thinking of the Internet over the past decade and the future of the Internet, it is still just the beginning "
Professor Shi's article published in
J. St-Yves, H. Bahrami, P. Jean, S. LaRochelle and W. Shi "Widely bandwidth-tunable silicon filter with an unlimited free-spectral range" Optics Letters 40, 5471-5474 (2015).
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