We experimentally demonstrate a 16 × 16 non-blocking optical switch fabric with a footprint of 10.7 × 4.4 mm². The switch fabric is composed of 56 2 × 2 silicon Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs), with each integrated with a pair of TiN resistive micro-heaters and a p-i-n diode. The average on-chip insertion loss at 1560 nm wavelength is ~6.7 dB and ~14 dB for the "all-cross" and "all-bar" states, respectively, with a loss variation of ± 1 dB over all routing paths. The measured rise/fall time of the switch upon electrical tuning is 3.2/2.5 ns. The switching functionality is verified by transmission of 20 Gb/s on-off keying (OOK) and 50 Gb/s quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) optical signals.

We design, fabricate, and characterize a 7-bit reconfigurable optical true time delay line consisting of Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) switches on the silicon photonics platform. Variable optical attenuators (VOAs) are embedded to suppress the inter-symbol crosstalk caused by the finite extinction ratio of switches. The device can provide a maximum of 1.27 ns delay with a 10 ps resolution over a wide wavelength range. Eye diagram measurement of a 25 Gbps 2(51)-1 pseudo-random bit sequence (PRBS) signal reveals the power penalties only increase 0.17 dB and 0.77 dB after transmission through the shortest (reference) and the longest (1.27 ns delay) paths, respectively.

We report a broadband 4 Â 4 nonblocking optical switch with Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) as switch elements on a silicon platform. Silicon resistive heaters are used for phase error correction of MZI arms with total thermooptic power consumption of 33.7 mW. Fast switching is enabled by p-i-n diodes, with average electrooptic tuning power of 14.3 mW for the 24 essential switching states as required for nonblocking routing. The average on-chip insertion loss is 5.8-7.7 dB and crosstalk better than À12 dB at wavelength of 1550 nm. Optical transmission experiments using a highthroughput 50 Gb/s quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) optical signal reveal that no significant deterioration is observed on constellation diagrams.

We experimentally demonstrate a silicon 4 × 4 nonblocking thermo-optic (TO) switch using a generalized MachZehnder interferometer constructed on multimode interferometers. All the 24 switching states for nonblocking switching are characterized. The device fabricated using CMOS technologies has a footprint of 2.8 × 0.65 mm 2 . The measured average on-chip insertion loss is 9 ± 2 dB and the crosstalk for all switching states is better than -12 dB. The average TO switching power consumption is 109 mW. The switching functionality is verified by transmission of a 40-Gb/s quadrature phase-shift keying optical signal.

We present the experimental demonstration of a 4 × 4 silicon electro-optic (EO) switch fabric based on a Benes architecture. Double-ring-assisted Mach-Zehnder interferometers (DR-MZIs) are utilized as the basic switch elements. Silicon resistive microheaters and p-i-n diodes are embedded in both of the microrings of the DR-MZIs for low-loss thermooptic (TO) phase correction and high-speed switching operation, respectively. The TO tuning power dissipated to align all resonances is 22.37 mW. The maximum EO tuning power required to switch all DR-MZIs is only 1.38 mW. The average on-chip insertion loss is in the range of 4-5.8 dB for all switching states. The transmission spectrum measurement shows that the device can perform switching in a ∼35-GHz spectral window with the worst crosstalk being −18.4 dB.