Recent advances in integrated silicon photonics engine for coherent optical communications

Silicon photonics (SiPh) are promising technologies for digital coherent optical communications because they can monolithically integrate all optical functions except for a laser, namely, modulators, mixers, photodiodes, a polarization beam splitter/combiner, and rotator, onto a single chip. We developed SiPh-based coherent optical subassemblies (COSAs) for various bit-rate systems. We review recent advances in SiPh technologies and discuss our experimental demonstration resulting in from 32-Gbaud to 96-Gbaud optical signal generation and detection for 100-Gbps to beyond 400-Gbps systems with our COSAs.