32 × 32 silicon electro-optic switch with built-in monitors and balanced-status units

Abstract

To construct large-scale silicon electro-optical switches for optical interconnections, we developed a method using a limited number of power monitors inserted at certain positions to detect and determine the optimum operating points of all switch units to eliminate non-uniform effects arising from fabrication errors. We also introduced an optical phase bias to one phase-shifter arm of a Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI)-type switch unit to balance the two operation statuses of a silicon electro-optical switch during push–pull operation. With these methods, a 32 × 32 MZI-based silicon electro-optical switch was successfully fabricated with 180-nm complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) process technology, which is the largest scale silicon electro-optical switch to the best of our knowledge. At a wavelength of 1520 nm, the on-chip insertion losses were 12.9 to 16.5 dB, and the crosstalk ranged from −17.9 to −24.8 dB when all units were set to the ‘Cross’ status. The losses were 14.4 to 18.5 dB, and the crosstalk ranged from −15.1 to −19.0 dB when all units were in the ‘Bar’ status. The total power consumptions of the 32 × 32 switch were 247.4 and 542.3 mW when all units were set to the ‘Cross’ and ‘Bar’ statuses, respectively.

Miniature Multilevel Optical Memristive Switch Using Phase Change Material

“…Silicon photonics has emerged as a suitable platform for integrated optics owing to its low power consumption, small footprint, low cost by leveraging the advanced complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) manufacturing process [1,2]. In the past few years, varieties of silicon photonic switches have been demonstrated on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform with thermo-optic (TO) effect [3,4], electro-optic (EO) effect [5][6][7], and micro-electro-mechanical-system (MEMS) actuation [8]. The MEMS actuator requires a high drive voltage of 40 V for turn-on and 25 V for turn-off [8].…”

Optics in Computing: From Photonic Network-on-Chip to Chip-to-Chip Interconnects and Disintegrated Architectures

“…3 illustrates the evolution of the most important pNoC and onchip switch implementations reported during the last decade. Silicon switches have witnessed a remarkable progress yielding high-port connectivity arrangements with a variety of underlying physical mechanisms like the thermo-optic (TO), electro-optic (EO) and opto-mechanical effects [107] currently allowing for 32×32 EO Mach-Zehnder Interferometric (MZI)based layouts [60], 64×64 TO MZI designs [61] and up to 128×128 Microelectromechanical switches (MEMS) [66].…”

On-chip silicon photonic signaling and processing: a review

“…The switching time of the device was 4 ns. Now, the start-of-art silicon photonic EO switch has 1.2 ns switching time, and can operate up to 32 inputs and 32 outputs [251]. Another consideration is the combination of EO and TO [252].…”