Recently, the emerging 2 μm waveband has gained increasing interest due to its great potential for a wide scope of applications. Compared with the existing optical communication windows at shorter wavelengths, it also offers distinct advantages of lower nonlinear absorption, better fabrication tolerance, and larger free carrier plasma effects for silicon photonics, which has been a proven device technology. While much progress has been witnessed for silicon photonics at the 2 μm waveband, the primary challenge still exists for on-chip detectors. Despite the maturity and compatibility of the waveguide coupled photodetectors made of germanium, the 2 μm regime is far beyond its cutoff wavelength. In this work, we demonstrate an efficient and high-speed on-chip waveguide-coupled germanium photodetector operating at the 2 μm waveband. The weak sub-bandgap absorption of epitaxial germanium is greatly enhanced by a lateral separation absorption charge multiplication structure. The detector is fabricated by the standard process offered by a commercial foundry. The device has a benchmark performance with responsivity of 1.05 A/W and 3 dB bandwidth of 7.12 GHz, which is able to receive high-speed signals with up to 20 Gbit/s data rate. The availability of such an efficient and fast on-chip detector circumvents the barriers between silicon photonic integrated circuits and the potential applications at the 2 μm waveband.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a universal and blind polarization-state tracking scheme for M-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals based on a decision-free radius-directed linear Kalman filter (RD-LKF). The polarization tracking performance is investigated through simulation and experiments for both quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) and 16-QAM signals. The influence of the filter parameters on the static polarization demultiplexing performance and dynamic tracking capability are discussed via simulation. The optimization strategy of the filter parameters in modulation-format-independent scenarios is proposed and simulations are carried out to evaluate the polarization demultiplexing penalty for QPSK, 16QAM, and hybrid QPSK/16QAM signals. Finally, the proposed decision-free RD-LKF is experimentally compared to the respective algorithms of constant modulus algorithm and multimodulus algorithm for QPSK and 16-QAM and the advantage of ultrafast polarization tracking ability is confirmed.