Abstract
Due to eye safety regulations, the allowable transmitted power in an optical wireless communication system is limited. Maximization of the optical power collected at the receiver is required in order to achieve the link power budget needed for maximum-speed data transfer. A large optical aperture at the receiver yields efficient power collection. Large-area top-illuminated photodiodes can on the one hand collect much light, but on the other hand inherently have a large capacitance and, thus, a reduced electrical bandwidth. To completely break this optical-electrical tradeoff, we propose a new class of optical receivers, i.e., cascaded aperture optical receivers. Such an optical receiver decouples the light collection function from the light detection one by using two separate apertures: the first function is done by surface grating coupler(s) feeding the received light into a waveguide, and the second one by an ultrahigh speed waveguide-coupled photodiode. These two apertures can be engineered independently to optimize the overall optical and electrical properties of the receiver. Empowered by an integrated cascaded aperture optical receiver fabricated on our InP membrane platform, we successfully demonstrated an indoor optical wireless communication system with a 200 Gb/s (5λ × 40 Gb/s) capacity.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | 8106790 |
Pages (from-to) | 57-67 |
Number of pages | 11 |
Journal | Journal of Lightwave Technology |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2018 |
Funding
Manuscript received June 30, 2017; revised September 19, 2017; accepted October 20, 2017. Date of publication November 12, 2017; date of current version February 24, 2018. This work was supported in part by the European Research Council in the FP-7 Advanced Grant projects BROWSE and NOLIM-ITS, and in part by the NWO Gravitation project Integrated Nanophotonics. (Zizheng Cao, Yuqing Jiao, and Longfei Shen contributed equally to this work). (Corresponding authors: Zizheng Cao; T. Koonen.) The authors are with the Institute for Photonic Integration (IPI), Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven 513, The Netherlands (e-mail: z.cao@tue. nl; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; j.j.g.m. [email protected]; [email protected]).
Keywords
- Cascaded aperture optical receiver
- InP membrane
- optical wireless communication
- surface grating
- uni-traveling-carrier photodiode