A dual-detector optical receiver for PDM signals detection

We propose and fabricate a silicon based dual-detector optical receiver, which consists of a two dimensional (2D) grating coupler (GC) and two separate germanium photodetectors (Ge PDs). The 2D GC performs polarization diversity, and thus demultiplexing and detection for polarization division multiplexed (PDM) signals can be achieved. Through a specific design with double-sides illumination, the space charge density can be reduced and the responsivity and saturation power can be improved significantly. The measured dark current, responsivity and bandwidth are 0.86 μA, 1.06 A/W and 36 GHz under 3 V reverse biased voltage, respectively. Both DC currents and eye diagrams are measured for the proposed device and the results validate its performance successfully. The power penalty between the single and dual polarized signals is about 1.9 dB under 10 and 20 Gb/s cases for both the two Ge PDs. The proposed direct detection (DD) for PDM signals with high speed, high responsivity and large saturation power is cost-effective and promising for short reach optical communication.