All-optical high-speed signal processing with silicon-organic hybrid slot waveguidesx

Integrated optical circuits based on silicon-on-insulator technology are likely to become the mainstay of the photonics industry. Over recent years an impressive range of silicon-on-insulator devices has been realized, including waveguides(1,2), filters(3,4) and photonic-crystal devices(5). However, silicon-based all-optical switching is still challenging owing to the slow dynamics of two-photon generated free carriers. Here we show that silicon-organic hybrid integration overcomes such intrinsic limitations by combining the best of two worlds, using mature CMOS processing to fabricate the waveguide, and molecular beam deposition to cover it with organic molecules that efficiently mediate all-optical interaction without introducing significant absorption. We fabricate a 4-mm-long silicon-organic hybrid waveguide with a record nonlinearity coefficient of gamma approximate to 1 x 10(5) W-1 km(-1) and perform all-optical demultiplexing of 170.8 Gb s(-1) to 42.7 Gb s(-1). This is-to the best of our knowledge-the fastest silicon photonic optical signal processing demonstrated.