We experimentally demonstrate a spatially non-blocking five-port optical router, which is based on microring resonators tuned through the thermo-optic effect. The characteristics of the microring-resonator-based switching element are investigated to achieve balanced performances in its two output ports. The optical router is fabricated on the SOI platform using standard CMOS processing. The effective footprint of the device is about 440×660 μm2. The microring resonators have 3-dB bandwidths of larger than 0.31 nm (38 GHz), and extinction ratios of better than 21 dB for through ports and 16 dB for drop ports. Finally, 12.5 Gbps high-speed signal transmission experiments verify the routing functionality of the optical router.

We have designed and fabricated a directed logic architecture consisting of two silicon microring resonators that can perform XOR and XNOR operations. The microring resonators are modulated through thermo-optic effect. Two electrical modulating signals applied to the microring resonators represent the two operands of the logical operation. The logical function is evaluated through the directed propagation of light in the device, and the result is represented by the output optical signal. Both XOR and XNOR operations at 20 kbits are demonstrated.

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We demonstrate a 26 Gbit/s Mach-Zehnder silicon optical modulator. The doping concentration and profile are optimized, and a modulation efficiency with the figure of merit (VπL) of 1.28 V·cm is achieved. We design an 80-nm-wide intrinsic silicon gap between the p-type and n-type doped regions to reduce the capacitance of the diode and prevent the diode from working in a slow diffusion mode. Therefore, the modulator can be driven with a small differential voltage of 0.5 V with no bias. Without the elimination of the dissipated power of the series resistors and the reflected power of the electrical signal, the maximum power consumption is 3.8 mW.

We propose and demonstrate an optical signal processor performing matrix-vector multiplication, which is composed of laser-modulator array, multiplexer, splitter, microring modulator matrix and photodetector array. 8 × 10⁷ multiplications and accumulations (MACs) per second is implemented at the clock at a clock frequency of 10 MHz. All functional units can be ultimately monolithically integrated on a chip with the development of silicon photonics and an efficient high-performance computing system is expected in the future.

We design and fabricate a four-port optical router, which is composed of eight microring-resonator-based switching elements, four optical waveguides and six waveguide crossings. The extinction ratio is about 13 dB for the through port and larger than 30 dB for the drop port. The crosstalk of the measured optical links is less than -13 dB. The average tuning power consumption is about 10.37 mW and the tuning efficiency is 5.398 mW/nm. The routing functionality and optical signal integrity are verified by transmitting a 12.5 Gb/s PRBS optical signal.

Abstract-We demonstrate a five-port optical router that is suitable for large-scale photonic networks-on-chip. The optical router is designed to passively route the optical signal travelling in one direction and actively route the optical signal making a turn. In the case that an XY dimension-order routing is used, the passive routing feature guarantees that the maximum power consumption to route the data through the network is a constant that is independent of the network size. The fabricated device has an efficient footprint of ∼ 460 × 1000 µm 2 . The routing functionality of the device is verified by using a 12.5-Gbit/s optical signal. The capability of multiwavlength routing for the optical router is also explored and discussed.Index Terms-Multiprocessor interconnection networks, optical resonators, optical switches, wavelength division multiplexing.

We propose and demonstrate a directed OR/NOR and AND/NAND logic circuit consisting of two parallel microring resonators (MRRs). We use two electrical signals representing the two operands of the logical operation to modulate the two MRRs through the thermo-optic effect, respectively. The final operation results are represented by the output optical signals. Both OR/NOR and AND/NAND operations at 10 kbps are demonstrated.