Wide deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) is inducing exponentially growing energy consumption. Traditional digital platforms are becoming difficult to fulfill such ever-growing demands on energy efficiency as well as computing latency, which necessitates the development of high efficiency analog hardware platforms for AI. Recently, optical and electrooptic hybrid computing is reactivated as a promising analog hardware alternative because it can accelerate the information processing in an energy-efficient way. Integrated photonic circuits offer such an analog hardware solution for implementing photonic AI and machine learning. For this purpose, we proposed a photonic analog of support vector machine and experimentally demonstrated low-latency and low-energy classification computing, which evidences the latency and energy advantages of optical analog computing over traditional digital computing. We also proposed an electrooptic Hopfield network for classifying and recognizing time-series data. This paper will review our work on implementing classification computing and Hopfield network by leveraging silicon photonic circuits.

Fiber four-wave mixing (FWM) based parametric wavelength conversion experiment is demonstrated. Over 91nm multi-channel simultaneous conversion is achieved. The bandwidth is to our knowledge, the broadest value of the published results. We shall argue that the method to realize the broadband wavelength conversion. Efficiency and/or bandwidth of the wavelength conversion is degraded mainly by the following obstacles, (a) inhomogeneity of the chromatic dispersion distribution along the fiber, (b) mismatch of the states of polarization (SOP) between pump and signals and (c) bandwidth limitation from coherence length. We discuss that an extremely short high-nonlinear fiber should overcome the above three obstacles. Furthermore we comment on the higher-order dispersion and also the influence of the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). High-nonlinearity dispersion-shifted fiber (HNL-DSF) is a promising solution to generate the FWM efficiently in spite of the short length usage. We develop and fabricate HNL-DSF by the vapor-phase axial deposition method. Nonlinear coefficient of the fiber is 13.8 W-1km-1. We measure the conversion efficiency spectra of the four HNL-DSFs with different lengths. Length of each fiber is 24.5 km, 1.2 km, 200 m and 100 m respectively. It is shown that conversion bandwidth increases monotonically as the fiber length decreases. The result apparently proves the advantage of the extremely short fiber.

This paper presents a fast and large-scale optical circuit-switch architecture for intra-datacenter applications that uses a combination of space switches and wavelength-routing switches are utilized. A 1,440 × 1,440 optical switch is designed with a fast-tunable laser, 8×8 delivery-and-coupling switch, and a 180×180 wavelength-routing switch. We test the bit-error-ratio characteristics of all ports of the wavelength-routing switch using 180-wavelength 10-Gbps signals in the full C-band. The worst switching time, 498 microseconds, is confirmed and all bit-error ratios are acceptable.

Research and development of a multi-degree colorless, directionless and contentionless reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (CDC-ROADM) has recently been attracting a lot of attention. A large-scale transponder aggregator (TPA) is indispensable for providing high-capacity flexible connections to optical networks. In this paper, we report our study of the requirements for the TPA, which is a key technology for achieving flexible optical networks. To meet the requirements, we have developed an 848 TPA prototype based on Si photonics technology. This prototype was made with a few 88 Si optical switches and designed to be used with a commercial ROADM system. The 88 Si optical switches are made by integrating 152 Mach Zehnder (MZ) Thermo Optoelectronic (TO) 22 optical switch elements. A double gate structure is introduced to achieve the high extinction ratio (ER) required for optical communication. To the best of our knowledge, this is the world's first Si-TPA that can be used with a commercial ROADM system. By evaluating the basic optical characteristics utilizing real-time 100 Gbps digital coherent detection as one of today's practical technologies and a 4.4 THz spectral bandwidth 20 Tbps super-channel with digital coherent detection, as a promising future technology, we have confirmed that our prototype Si-TPA has the potential for practical use and future extensibility.

We have developed the design procedure of multi-wavelength pumped Raman amplifiers, introducing superposition rule and account for pump-to-pump energy transfer. It is summarized with respect to the pumping wavelength and power allocation. The comparisons between simulated and experimental results are presented. Section 2 reviews the fundamentals of Raman amplifier. In this section, Raman gain spectra measured for different fibers are presented and the difference among the spectra is discussed. Section 3 describes the way to determine the pumping wavelength allocation by introducing superposition method. By means of this design method, some optimized design examples are presented, where the peak levels of Raman gain are fixed to 10 dB for the wavelength range from 1525 nm to 1615 nm (C- plus L-band) in all cases. From these results, it is confirmed that better gain flatness can be obtained by using the larger number of pumps. Section 4 explains how the pump-to-pump energy transfer changes the gain profile by experimental and simulated results. In this section, simulation modeling to perform precise numerical simulation is also presented. From the above discussion, the design procedure can be simplified: (1) one determines pump wavelengths with which a desired composite Raman gain can be obtained by adding in logarithmic scale individual Raman gain spectra shifted by the respective wavelength differences with adequate weight factors. And (2), one predicts how much power should be launched in order to realize the weight factors through precise numerical simulations. Section 5 verifies the superposition rule and the effect of pump-to-pump energy transfer by comparing a measured Raman gain with a superposed one. The agreement of two gain profiles shows that the multi-wavelength pumped Raman gain profile contains only the individual gain profiles created by the respective pump wavelengths. Section 6 concludes this paper.

We have developed the design procedure of multi-wavelength pumped Raman amplifiers, introducing superposition rule and account for pump-to-pump energy transfer. It is summarized with respect to the pumping wavelength and power allocation. The comparisons between simulated and experimental results are presented. Section 2 reviews the fundamentals of Raman amplifier. In this section, Raman gain spectra measured for different fibers are presented and the difference among the spectra is discussed. Section 3 describes the way to determine the pumping wavelength allocation by introducing superposition method. By means of this design method, some optimized design examples are presented, where the peak levels of Raman gain are fixed to 10 dB for the wavelength range from 1525 nm to 1615 nm (C- plus L-band) in all cases. From these results, it is confirmed that better gain flatness can be obtained by using the larger number of pumps. Section 4 explains how the pump-to-pump energy transfer changes the gain profile by experimental and simulated results. In this section, simulation modeling to perform precise numerical simulation is also presented. From the above discussion, the design procedure can be simplified: (1) one determines pump wavelengths with which a desired composite Raman gain can be obtained by adding in logarithmic scale individual Raman gain spectra shifted by the respective wavelength differences with adequate weight factors. And (2), one predicts how much power should be launched in order to realize the weight factors through precise numerical simulations. Section 5 verifies the superposition rule and the effect of pump-to-pump energy transfer by comparing a measured Raman gain with a superposed one. The agreement of two gain profiles shows that the multi-wavelength pumped Raman gain profile contains only the individual gain profiles created by the respective pump wavelengths. Section 6 concludes this paper.

We review our research progress of multi-port optical switches based on the silicon photonics platform. Up to now, the maximum port-count is 32 input ports×32 output ports, in which transmissions of all paths were demonstrated. The switch topology is path-independent insertion-loss (PILOSS) which consists of an array of 2×2 element switches and intersections. The switch presented an average fiber-to-fiber insertion loss of 10.8 dB. Moreover, -20-dB crosstalk bandwidth of 14.2 nm was achieved with output-port-exchanged element switches, and an average polarization-dependent loss (PDL) of 3.2 dB was achieved with a non-duplicated polarization-diversity structure enabled by SiN overpass waveguides. In the 8×8 switch, we demonstrated wider than 100-nm bandwidth for less than -30-dB crosstalk with double Mach-Zehnder element switches, and less than 0.5 dB PDL with polarization diversity scheme which consisted of two switch matrices and fiber-type polarization beam splitters. Based on the switch performances described above, we discuss further improvement of switching performances.

High gain extinction ratio and stable control of the phase in phase sensitive amplification are fundamental to realize either phase regeneration or quadrature squeezing of phase modulated signals in an efficient and robust manner. In this paper, we show that a combination of our previously demonstrated “sideband-assisted” dual-pump phase sensitive amplifier with a gain extinction ratio of more than 25dB, and a phase-locked loop based stabilization technique, enable efficient QPSK quadrature squeezing. Its stable operation is exploited to realize phase de-multiplexing of QPSK signals into BPSK tributaries. The phase de-multiplexed signals are evaluated through measurement of constellation diagrams, eye diagrams and more importantly, BER curves. The de-multiplexed BPSK signals exhibited an OSNR penalty of less than 1dB compared to the back-to-back BPSK signals.

We propose a cyclic sleep control technique for backup resources in reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) systems to simultaneously achieve power savings and high-speed recovery from failures. Processes to check the reliability of backup resources, backup transponders and paths, are also provided in the control technique. The proposed technique uses sleep mode where backup transponders are powered down to minimize power for power savings. At least one of the backup transponders is always activated after self-checking using the loopback fiber connection in the ROADM and it becomes a shared backup for working transponders to enable high-speed recovery from failures. This activated backup transponder is powered down again after the next transponder is activated. These state transitions are cyclically applied to each backup transponder. This “cyclic” aspect of operation enables network operators to continuously monitor the reliability for all backup resources with the sleep mode. The activated backup transponders at both ends of the path are used in checking the reliability of backup paths. Therefore, all backup resources, both transponders and paths, can be regularly checked with the sleep mode to ensure data are stably forwarded. We estimated the power consumption with this technique under various conditions and found a trade-off between power reduction and the recovery capabilities from failures. We achieved more than 34% power saving of backup transponders maintaining the failure recovery time within 50ms in experiments. Furthermore, we confirmed the reliability of backup paths in experiments using backup transponders with the cyclic sleep control technique. These results indicated that the proposed control technique is promising in dramatically and reliably reducing the power consumption of backup resources.