Design and Implementation of an Integrated Reconfigurable Silicon Photonics Switch Matrix in IRIS Project

Abstract

This paper aims to present the design and the achieved results on a CMOS electronic and photonic integrated device for low cost, low power, transparent, mass-manufacturable optical switching. An unprecedented number of integrated photonic components (more than 1000), each individually electronically controlled, allows for the realization of a transponder aggregator device which interconnects up to eight transponders to a four direction colorless-directionless-contentionless ROADM. Each direction supports 12 200-GHz spaced wavelengths, which can be independently added or dropped from the network. An electronic ASIC, 3-D integrated on top of the photonic chip, controls the switch fabrics to allow a complete and microsecond fast reconfigurability

Automatic Initialization Methods for Photonic Components on a Silicon-Based Optical Switch

“…However, we could assign most of the loss increase to the presence of 48 additional crossings along the longest path (not to the propagation losses within the waveguides). This was consistent with the preliminary characterization of the IRIS building blocks, where we measured about 0.16 dB optical losses per single crossing [11].…”

“…Thermal crosstalk is negligible. Simulations and experimental results show that, for an MRR in the off state, the thermal crosstalk from adjacent MRRs move the resonance by less than 16 GHz [11]. Integrated photo-diodes placed after each stage, allow for an optimization based on optical feedback.…”

“…When more channels were simultaneously launched at the local ports, additional inter-channel interference could arise. This crosstalk analysis has been used to fix the isolation requirements of the optical components during the chip design [11]. Experiments in a fully aligned optical switch showed zero power penalties in the presence of 1, 2, or 3 interferences, with respect to the single channel transmission BER curve [15].…”

“…The IRIS architecture drives 48 optical channels, 200 GHz-spaced in the C-band, in 4 different directions, through 12 add/drop ports [11]. A fully packaged prototype has been completed and tested at 25 Gbps into the operational environment, with 12 wavelengths, 4 directions, and 8 add/drop ports [15].…”

Modeling and validation of high-performance and a-thermal AWGs for the silicon photonics platform

“…123 Today, after more than 20 years of continued research, AWGs are one of the most important filter type applied in WDM networks, and the advance of PIC technology is going to boost them even more. 4 In the WDM scheme, multiple sources are modulated and encoded to carry optical signals. The data rate for each channel is limited by the modulation speed.…”