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We report an 8 × 8 silicon photonic integrated Arrayed Waveguide Grating Router (AWGR) targeted for WDM routing applications in O-band. The AWGR was designed for cyclic-frequency operation with a channel spacing of 10 nm. The fabricated AWGR exhibits a compact footprint of 700 × 270 μm. Static device characterization revealed 3.545 dB maximum channel loss non-uniformity with 2.5 dB best-case channel insertion losses and 11 dB channel crosstalk, in good agreement with the simulated results. Successful data routing operation is demonstrated with 25 Gb/s signals for all 8 × 8 AWGR port combinations with a maximum power penalty of 2.45 dB.

We present a new optical biosensing integration approach with multifunctional capabilities using plasmonic and photonic components on the same chip and a new methodology to design interferometric biosensors exhibiting record high sensitivity and enhanced resolution relying on a planar surface plasmon polariton (SPP) waveguide. First, we use this approach to demonstrate a proof of concept integrated plasmo-photonic liquid refractive index sensor based on a silicon nitride (Si 3 N 4 ) Mach− Zehnder Interferometer (MZI). A 70 μm long, gold metal stripe is incorporated in the sensing arm serving as the transducer element. A variable optical attenuator and a thermo-optic phase shifter are deployed in the Si 3 N 4 reference arm for performance optimization. The variable optical attenuator stage targets high extinction ratio of the resonance at the interferometer output by balancing the power between the two arms whereas the phase shifter is used to tune the MZI at the desired spectral window. Experimental results matched well with numerical simulations showing bulk sensitivity up to 1930 nm/RIU and a resonance extinction ratio of 37 dB. We also provide a theoretical analysis for correlating the sensitivity performance of the sensor with its free spectral range (FSR). Based on this analysis, we propose optimized sensor designs and show that, by engineering the free spectral range of the sensor in the range of 600 nm, sensitivity may be boosted up to 60000 nm/RIU.

An optical RAM row access gate followed by a column address selector for wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM)-formatted words employing a single semiconductor optical amplifierVMach-Zehnder interferometer (SOA-MZI) is presented. RAM row access is performed by the SOA-MZI that grants random access to a 4-bit WDM-formatted optical word employing multiwavelength cross-phase-modulation (XPM) phenomena, whereas column decoding is carried out in a completely passive way using arrayed waveguide grating. Proof-of-concept experimental verification for both positive and negative logic access is demonstrated for 4 Â 10 Gb/s optical words, showing error-free operation with only 0.4-dBpeak-power penalty and requiring a power value of 25 mW/Gb/s.

The explosive growth of deep learning applications has triggered a new era in computing hardware, targeting the efficient deployment of multiply-and-accumulate operations. In this realm, integrated photonics have come to the foreground as a promising energy efficient deep learning technology platform for enabling ultra-high compute rates. However, despite integrated photonic neural network layouts have already penetrated successfully the deep learning era, their compute rate and noise-related characteristics are still far beyond their promise for high-speed photonic engines. Herein, we demonstrate experimentally a noise-resilient deep learning coherent photonic neural network layout that operates at 10GMAC/sec/axon compute rates and follows a noise-resilient training model. The coherent photonic neural network has been fabricated as a silicon photonic chip and its MNIST classification performance was experimentally evaluated to support accuracy values of >99% and >98% at 5 and 10GMAC/sec/axon, respectively, offering 6× higher on-chip compute rates and >7% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art coherent implementations.