An N-Port Universal Multimode Optical Router Supporting Mode-Division Multiplexing

Abstract

Optical network-on-chip (ONoC) is based on optical interconnects and optical routers (ORs), which have obvious advantages in bandwidth and power consumption. Transmission capacity is a significant performance in ONoC architecture, which has to be fully considered during the design process. Relying on mode-division multiplexing (MDM) technology, the system capacity of optical interconnection is greatly improved compared to the traditional multiplexing technology. With the explosion in MDM technology, the optical router supporting MDM came into being. In this paper, we design a multimode optical router (MDM-OR) model and analyze its indicators. Above all, we propose a novel multimode switching element and design an N-port universal multimode optical router (MDM-OR) model. Secondly, we analyze the insertion loss model of different optical devices and the crosstalk noise model of N-port MDM-OR. On this basis, a multimode router structure of a single-mode five-port optical router is proposed. At the same time, we analyze the transmission loss, crosstalk noise, signal-to-noise radio (OSNR), and bit error rate (BER) of different input–output pairs by inputting the 1550 nm TE0, TE1, and TE2 modes to the router.