Propagation of light beams through scattering or multimode systems may lead to the randomization of the spatial coherence of the light. Although information is not lost, its recovery requires a coherent interferometric reconstruction of the original signals, which have been scrambled into the modes of the scattering system. Here we show that we can automatically unscramble optical beams that have been arbitrarily mixed in a multimode waveguide, undoing the scattering and mixing between the spatial modes through a mesh of silicon photonics tuneable beam splitters. Transparent light detectors integrated in a photonic chip are used to directly monitor the evolution of each mode along the mesh, allowing sequential tuning and adaptive individual feedback control of each beam splitter. The entire mesh self-configures automatically through a progressive tuning algorithm and resets itself after significantly perturbing the mixing, without turning off the beams. We demonstrate information recovery by the simultaneous unscrambling, sorting and tracking of four mixed modes, with residual cross-talk of −20 dB between the beams. Circuit partitioning assisted by transparent detectors enables scalability to meshes with a higher port count and to a higher number of modes without a proportionate increase in the control complexity. The principle of self-configuring and self-resetting in optical systems should be applicable in a wide range of optical applications.

As photonics moves from the single-device level toward large-scale, integrated, and complex systems on a chip, monitoring, control, and stabilization of the components become critical. We need to monitor a circuit non-invasively and apply a simple, fast, and robust feedback control. Here, we show non-invasive monitoring and feedback control of high-quality-factor silicon (Si) photonic resonators assisted by a transparent detector that is directly integrated inside the cavity. Control operations are entirely managed by a CMOS microelectronic circuit that is bridged to the Si photonic chip and hosts many parallel electronic readout channels. Advanced functionalities, such as wavelength tuning, locking, labeling, and swapping, are demonstrated. The non-invasive nature of the transparent monitor and the scalability of the CMOS readout system offer a viable solution for the control of arbitrarily reconfigurable photonic integrated circuits aggregating many components on a single chip.

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A photonic integrated circuit performing simultaneous mode and wavelength demultiplexing for few-mode-fiber transmission is demonstrated for the first time. The circuit is realized on an InP-based technological platform; it can handle up to eight mode- and wavelength-division-multiplexed (MDM/WDM) channels and allows all-optical multiple-input-multiple-output processing to unscramble mode mixing generated by fiber propagation. A single arrayed waveguide grating is used to demultiplex the WDM channels carried by all the propagating modes, optimizing circuit complexity, chip area, and operational stability. Combined with an integrated wideband mode multiplexer the circuit is successfully exploited for the transmission of 10  Gbit/s on-off-keying non-return-to-zero channels with a residual cross talk of about -15  dB.

A mixed-signal electronic system allowing closed-loop control of 16 independent integrated photonic devices equipped with CLIPP transparent optical probes (-35 dBm sensitivity, 50 kHz speed) is presented. It features a 32-channel CMOS lock-in front-end (203 nV /â\u88\u9aHz noise, 100 dB dynamic range), interfaced via conditioning chains to multiple ADCs and DACs driven by a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA for real-time processing, including the generation and demodulation of multiple pilot tones for channel labeling and dithering-based feedback. The results of the platform characterization are reported, along with the first application of automatic control applied to a novel all-optical unscrambler for mode-division multiplexing