Optical pulse compression based on nonlinear silicon waveguides and chirped Bragg gratings

Due to the growing demand for higher bandwidth, employing optical devices instead of electronic devices in data transmission systems has attracted much attention in recent years. Optical switches, modulators and wavelength converters are a few examples of the required optical devices. CMOS compatible fabrication of these devices, leads to much more growing of this technology. Optical pulse compression, is required for generating ultra-short pulses for high bandwidth optical transmission systems. In this work, we present a CMOS fabrication process compatible, integrated optical pulse compressor. A Silicon waveguide coated by MoS2 for nonlinearity enhancement is used for self-phase modulation and a chirped Bragg grating utilizing corrugated silicon waveguides is employed to achieve the required anomalous dispersion. Low power and high compression ratio were considered in this work. We achieved a compression ratio of 3.5 by using a relatively low power optical pulse of 8W and a short waveguide length of 1mm.