Continuous wave-pumped wavelength conversion in low-loss silicon nitride waveguides

Journal article, 2015

In this Letter we introduce a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-compatible low-loss Si3N4 waveguide platform for nonlinear integrated optics. The waveguide has a moderate nonlinear coefficient of 285 W∕km, but the achieved propagation loss of only 0.06 dB∕cm and the ability to handle high optical power facilitate an optimal waveguide length for wavelength conversion. We observe a constant quadratic dependence of the four-wave mixing (FWM) process on the continuous-wave (CW) pump when operating in the C-band, which indicates that the waveguide has negligible high-power constraints owing to nonlinear losses. We achieve a conversion efficiency of −26.1 dB and idler power generation of −19.6 dBm. With these characteristics, we present for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, CW-pumped data conversion in a non-resonant Si3N4 waveguide.