Photonic integrated field-programmable disk array signal processor

Abstract

Thanks to the nature of strong programmability, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been playing a significant role in signal processing and control. With the explosive growth in digital data, big data analytics becomes an important emerging field, in which FPGAs are a major player. However, the computational speed and power efficiency provided by FPGAs are limited by electronic clock rates and Ohmic losses. To overcome the limitations, photonics is envisioned as an enabling solution, thanks to its ultrafast and low power consumption feature. In this paper, we propose a scalable photonic field-programmable disk array (FPDA) signal processor. Ultra-compact microdisk resonators are leveraged as a fundamental execution units in the core to route, store and process optical signals. By fieldprogramming the processor, diverse circuit topologies can be realized to perform multiple specific signal processing functions including filtering, temporal differentiation, time delay, beamforming, and spectral shaping.

Non‐Volatile Reconfigurable Integrated Photonics Enabled by Broadband Low‐Loss Phase Change Material

“…Finally, a Sb 2 S 3 integrated non‐volatile microring switch is demonstrated which can be tuned electrically between a high and low transmission state with an extinction ratio of over 30dB. The work experimentally verified the prominent optical phase modification and low loss of Sb 2 S 3 (abbreviated as SbS in the rest of the paper) in a broad wavelength range, enabling potential applications such as optical FPGAs, [ 26,27 ] post‐fabrication trimming, [ 31 ] and large‐scale integrated quantum photonic networks. [ 32 ]…”

“…While GST provides clear advantages over other tuning mechanisms in terms of power consumption and compact size, the performance of GST-SOI based integrated photonics is fundamentally limited by strong band to band absorption in the visible wavelengths and the near-IR (see Table 2 and Insertion loss in Table 1). Therefore, GST becomes impractical for large-scale PIC platforms [24,25] and optical Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) [26,27] where light is guided through numerous phase change photonic routers. While device engineering can circumvent some of the losses at 1550 nm, [28,29] this comes at the expense of increased device length, and such approach does not work near visible wavelength, where the optical loss is very large.…”

A New Family of Ultralow Loss Reversible Phase‐Change Materials for Photonic Integrated Circuits: Sb2S3 and Sb2Se3

“…[ 1–6 ] Rewritable photonic elements add versatility and tunability to application‐specific optical technology, with an ultimate application as a programmable photonic processor. [ 7–10 ] Currently, a number of technologies are available for on‐chip tunable or switchable photonics. [ 11 ] Embedded heaters are commonly used to fine‐tune components by altering the temperature dependent refractive index of silicon waveguides.…”

Optical Realization of Wave-Based Analog Computing with Metamaterials

“…Compared with standard digital processes, all-optical analog approaches do not refer to photoelectric converters but directly manipulate optical signals both temporally and spatially [12]. In the temporal domain, high-speed pulse waveform modulation enables numerous applications, including analog computing [13][14][15][16][17][18][19], differential equations solving [19][20][21][22][23], optical memory [24,25], photonic neural networks [26,27] and complex nonlinear system simulation [28][29][30]. In the spatial domain, the input functions are indicated by the spatial wavefronts which will be mathematically transformed with pre-designed optical systems.…”