12-Gbps All-Optical Switching via Nonlinear Kerr Effect in Silicon Carbide Micro-Ring Resonator

In recent years, versatile optoelectronic devices have been developed and studied to employ on a Si chip. For the development of the high data rate network, high-speed data processing in the next-generation photonic integrated circuit starts to be studied. All-optical data processing via the nonlinear optical characteristics of the material is one of the methods to solve the degradation of the data rate induced by the parasitic capacitance of the transmission line. However, the nonlinear optical effects including the two-photon-absorption (TPA), nonlinear Kerr effect, and four-wave mixing, need high-intensity pumping to induce. In addition, the high-intensity pumping also generates thermal energy to decay the device performance. There, the silicon carbide (SiC) is one of the candidates to be employed to all-optical data processing due to its high thermal stability and damage threshold. In addition, the nonlinear refractive index of the SiC can be enhanced by inserting C atoms because the excessive C atoms can form the graphite- and diamond-like C-C bonds to increase the third-order nonlinear optical susceptibility [1]–[3]. In this work, the C-rich SiC-based micro-ring resonator for wavelength conversion and data inversion is demonstrated via the nonlinear refractive index-induced Kerr effect.