Modeling and Evaluation of Chip-to-Chip Scale Silicon Photonic Networks

Nonlinear Temperature-Dependent Transfer Characteristics of Silicon Photonic Microring Resonators

“…Our results also indicate that the limiting power factor of a high-Q drop ring resonators starts to be nonnegligible at a threshold of about 15 dBm for continuous wave (CW) input light. This is higher than the experimental measurements of Li et al [8] for ring modulators, but smaller than the nonlinear threshold of 20 dBm generally assumed to calculate optical power budgets [12,13]. Therefore, to conserve this 20 dBm value, thermal stabilization is required to compensate not only temperature changes of the surrounding, but also the ones triggered by the ring itself.…”

Scaling silicon photonic switch fabrics for data center interconnection networks

“…Due to the presence of non-linear effects in silicon waveguides, the power of signals traveling through the switch fabric must stay below 20dBm. On the other hand, signal powers > −15dBm per channel are typically required at the transmission link end (before the WDM demultiplexing stage) to ensure signal recovery from detector with −20dBm detector sensitivity [7]. In a scenario where no optical amplification is leveraged, the resulting 35 dB power budget limits the radix of the switching fabric to 128 × 128 and 6 wavelengths per port.…”

“…The total number of wavelengths, obtained by multiplying the per port number with the switch radix, increases. The tuning and trimming power for all the rings for a 128 radix switch fabric, assuming 3.5mW [7] per ring would amount to ~6W for a total of 768 wavelengths. The physical and system layer analysis of the switch fabric is necessary to ensure proper functioning of the devices, but not sufficient for a practical integration.…”

“…It provides small area footprint, low power consumption (due to the close proximity of electronic drivers) and the potential for reduced fabrication costs at large scales. Silicon photonic switches have received significant research interest in the past several years for realizing intra-chip and intra-node interconnects [7][8][9] as well as inter-node interconnects for data centers or supercomputers. Integrated optical switching can be performed with various device configurations including, Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometers, 2D MEMS, and microrings.…”