On-chip integrated mode-division multiplexing (MDM) is an emerging technique for large-capacity data communications. In the past few years, while several configurations have been developed to realize on-chip MDM circuits, their practical applications are significantly hindered by the large footprint and inter-mode cross talk. Most importantly, the high-speed MDM signal transmission in an arbitrarily routed circuit is still absent. Herein, we demonstrate the MDM circuits based on digitized meta-structures which have extremely compact footprints. 112 Gbit/s signals encoded on each mode are arbitrarily routed through the circuits consisting of many sharp bends and compact crossings with a bit error rate under forward error correction limit. This will significantly improve the integration density and benefit various on-chip multimode optical systems.

Recently, 2-μm wave band has gained increasing interest due to its potential application for next-generation optical communication. But the development of 2-μm optical communications is substantially hampered by the modulation speed due to the device bandwidth constraints. Thus, a high-speed modulator is highly demanded at 2 μm. Motivated by this prospect, we demonstrate a high-speed silicon Mach–Zehnder modulator for a 2-μm wave band. The device is configured as a single-ended push–pull structure with waveguide electrorefraction via the free carrier plasma effect. The modulator was fabricated via a multiproject wafer shuttle run at a commercial silicon photonic foundry. The modulation efficiency of a single arm is measured to be 1.6 V · cm . The high-speed characterization is also performed, and the modulation speed can reach 80 Gbit/s with 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) formats.

We report on the design and characterization of ring-assisted (RA) few-mode fibers with improved minimum mode effective index difference MinΔn _eff . By introducing a high-index RA structure whose position coincides with the trough of mode power distribution of LP ₀₂ mode, the effective index of the LP ₂₁ mode can be largely elevated while that of LP ₀₂ mode remains almost unaffected. The dependences of both Δn _eff and effective mode area A _eff on different ring parameters have been investigated. We fabricated RA 4-mode fibers with a minimum Δ _neff (1.8 × 10 ^-3 ) which is 2.2 times larger than that of step-index (SI) 4-mode fiber (0.8 × 10 ^-3 ) without obvious degradation on other characteristics. The fabricated RA 4-mode fiber has a low mode-average loss and a low mode dependent loss of 0.23 and 0.02 dB/km at 1550-nm wavelength, respectively, which are comparable with that of an SI 4-mode fiber fabricated for reference purposes. The distributed inter-mode crosstalk of the fibers has been measured using swept-wavelength interferometry with a winding tension of 0.5 N. We observed similar distributed inter-mode crosstalk between the RA-FMF and the SI-FMF with low tension and the results show that no additional deformation was introduced by the high-index ring. As a result, the fabricated RA-FMF with a larger MinΔn _eff is expected to be more robust than SI-FMF in real applications. Moreover, we adopted this method for the design of 7-mode fibers and successfully obtained a minimum Δn _eff as high as 1.7 × 10 ^-3 and an effective area larger than 100 μm ² .

To overcome the capacity crunch of optical communications based on the traditional single-mode fiber (SMF), different modes in a few-mode fiber (FMF) can be employed for mode division multiplexing (MDM). MDM can also be extended to photonic integration for obtaining improved density and efficiency, as well as interconnection capacity. Therefore, MDM becomes the most promising method for maintaining the trend of “Moore’s law” in photonic integration and optical fiber transmission. In this tutorial, we provide a review of MDM works and cutting-edge progresses from photonic integration to optical fiber transmission, including our recent works of MDM low-noise amplification, FMF fiber design, MDM Si photonic devices, and so on. Research and application challenges of MDM for optical communications regarding long-haul transmission and short reach interconnection are discussed as well. The content is expected to be of important value for both academic researchers and industrial engineers during the development of next-generation optical communication systems, from photonic chips to fiber links.

Hollow-core fiber (HCF) has been attracting broad interests in recent decades, and has extended the communication window to longer wavelength, 2 micron. In this paper, we present a demonstration of low-latency HCF short-reach optical interconnection at 2 micron, achieving a high single-lane speed of 100 Gbps. High physical speed (near vacuum-light-speed) and high information speed (100-Gbps) optical interconnection with 100-m transmission distance is experimentally achieved with error-free performance. Probabilistically shaped discrete multi-tone (PS-DMT) modulation with entropy loading is employed to accommodate the deteriorated frequency response caused by the mode dispersion in HCF. Compared with conventional solid-core fiber (SCF), HCF contributes 30.95% (1.5-'s per kilometer) latency reduction for the physical link. The system level latency reduction is 28% for 1-km interconnection distance (11% for 100-m), with respect to a microsecond-scale switching network for typical datacenter applications. This work substantially leaps over the 100G milestone of 2-micron HCF optical interconnection, and shows the potentiality with lower latency and further higher capacity.