The impact of dispersion profiles of silicon waveguides on femtosecond optical parametric amplification (OPA) is theoretically investigated. It is found that flat quasi-phase-matching, smooth temporal profiles and separable spectra for 200 fs pulses can be obtained by tailoring the cross-section of silicon rib waveguide. We achieve on-chip parametric gain as high as 26.8 dB and idler conversion gain of 25.6 dB for a low pump peak power over a flat bandwidth of 400 nm in a 10-mm-long dispersion engineered silicon waveguide. Our on-chip OPA can find important potential applications in highly integrated optical circuits for all-optical ultrafast signal processing.
© 2011 Optical Society of America