Lossless High-speed Silicon Photonic MZI switch with a Micro-Transfer-Printed III-V amplifier

Zhang, Jing; Krückel, Clemens J.; Haq, Bahawal; Matuskova, Bozena; Rimböck, Johanna; Ertl, Stefan; Gocalinska, Agnieszka; Pelucchi, E.; Corbett, Brian; Campenhout, Joris Van; Lepage, Guy; Verheyen, Peter; Thourhout, Dries Van; Baets, Roel; Roelkens, Günther

doi:10.1109/ectc51906.2022.00077

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…When the port count gets to 16 and above, the total incurred penalty could well make the switch incompatible with current short-reach unamplified link specifications. Therefore, optical gain is needed and SOAs can be integrated via either flip-chip bonding [17][18][19] or micro-transfer printing [20].…”

Section: B Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…FCD effect offers nanosecond-scale switching time though it indeed comes at a price of higher loss and crosstalk due to the induced FCA [16]. Whilst gain integration has been widely demonstrated as a viable solution to tackle the switch insertion loss [17][18][19][20], coherent crosstalk remains trickier to handle and it adds penalty to the optical power budget creating a major signal integrity challenge. Efforts have been made in this respect by the use of nested switch elements [21][22][23] or dilated switch topologies [24], both of which trade off device complexity for improved crosstalk performance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Harnessing self-heating effect for ultralow-crosstalk electro-optic Mach–Zehnder switches

Bao¹,

Cheng²,

Wei³

et al. 2023

Photon. Res.

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This paper presents a novel approach to counterbalance free-carrier-absorption (FCA) in electro-optic (E-O) Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI) cells by harnessing the self-heating effect. We show insights on crosstalk limitations in MZIs with direct carrier-injection and provide a detailed design methodology on a differential phase shifter pair. Leveraging both free-carrier dispersion (FCD) and self-heating effects, our design enables arbitrary phase tuning with balanced FCA loss in the pair of arms, eliminating the need for additional phase corrections and creating ultralow crosstalk MZI elements. This neat design disengages from the commonly used nested structure, thus providing an opportunity of embedding tunable couplers for correcting imperfect splitting ratios given that only two are needed. We show that with the use of tunable directional couplers, a standard ±10 nm process variation is tolerated, while achieving a crosstalk ratio below −40 dB. By direct carrier injection in both arms, the proposed device operates at nanosecond scales and can bring about a breakthrough in the scalability of E-O switch fabrics, as well as other silicon integrated circuits that have stringent requirements for crosstalk leakage.

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Section: B Results and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harnessing self-heating effect for ultralow-crosstalk electro-optic Mach–Zehnder switches

Bao¹,

Cheng²,

Wei³

et al. 2023

Photon. Res.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…High-speed switches are one of the key building blocks in data centers and are nowadays often implemented in the electrical domain. In this section, the fabrication and performance of C-band lossless high-speed optical switches will be discussed [29]. The fabricated devices rely on a heterogeneous approach where the switching is implemented on imec's iSiPP50G platform while the optical gain is provided using µTP of III-V SOAs following the procedure discussed in section 3.…”

Section: Lossless Si Mzi Switch With Co-integrated Iii-v Amplifiermentioning

confidence: 99%

Micro-transfer printing InP C-band SOAs on advanced silicon photonics platform for lossless MZI switch fabrics and high-speed integrated transmitter

Zhang,

Bogaert,

Krueckel

et al. 2023

Preprint

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We present an approach for the heterogeneous integration of InP semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) and lasers on an advanced silicon photonics (SiPh) platform by using micro-transfer-printing (μTP). After the introduction of the μTP concept, the focus of this paper shifts to the demonstration of two C-band III-V/Si photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that are important in data-communication networks: an optical switch and a high-speed optical transmitter. First, a C-band lossless and high-speed Si Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) switch is demonstrated by co-integrating a set of InP SOAs with the Si MZI switch. The micro-transfer-printed SOAs provide 10 dB small-signal gain around 1560 nm with a 3 dB bandwidth of 30 nm. Secondly, an integrated transmitter combining an on-chip widely tunable laser and a doped-Si Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) is demonstrated. The laser has a continuous tuning range over 40 nm and the transmitter is capable of 40 Gbps non-return-to-zero (NRZ) back-to-back transmission at wavelengths ranging from 1539 to 1573 nm. These demonstrations pave the way for the realization of complex and fully integrated photonic systems-on-chip with integrated III-V-on-Si components, and this technique is transferable to other material films and devices that can be released from their native substrate.

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Harnessing Self-Heating Effect for Ultralow-Crosstalk Electro-Optic Mach-Zehnder Switches

Cheng¹,

Bao²,

Wei³

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents a novel approach to counterbalance free-carrier-absorption (FCA) in electro-optic (E-O) Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) cells by harnessing self-heating effect. We show insights on crosstalk limitations in MZIs with direct carrier-injection and provide a detailed design methodology on a differential phase shifter pair. Leveraging both free-carrier dispersion (FCD) and self-heating effects, our design enables arbitrary phase tuning with balanced FCA loss in the pair of arms, eliminating the need for additional phase corrections and creating ultralow crosstalk MZI elements. This neat design disengages from the commonly used nested structure and thus provides an opportunity of embedding tunable couplers for correcting imperfect splitting ratios given that only two of which are needed. We show that with the use of tunable direction couplers (DCs), a standard ±10 nm process variation is tolerated, whilst achieving below -40dB crosstalk ratio. By direct carrier injection in both arms, the proposed device operates at nanosecond scales and can bring about a breakthrough in the scalability of E-O switch fabrics, as well as other silicon integrated circuits that have stringent requirements on crosstalk leakage.

show abstract

Lossless High-speed Silicon Photonic MZI switch with a Micro-Transfer-Printed III-V amplifier

Cited by 4 publications

References 9 publications

Harnessing self-heating effect for ultralow-crosstalk electro-optic Mach–Zehnder switches

Harnessing self-heating effect for ultralow-crosstalk electro-optic Mach–Zehnder switches

Micro-transfer printing InP C-band SOAs on advanced silicon photonics platform for lossless MZI switch fabrics and high-speed integrated transmitter

Harnessing Self-Heating Effect for Ultralow-Crosstalk Electro-Optic Mach-Zehnder Switches

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