Five-port optical router for photonic networks-on-chip

Abstract

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.

Five-Port Optical Router Based on Microring Switches for Photonic Networks-on-Chip

“…In practice the identically designed MRRs have a resonance wavelength shift (> 1 nm) due to the imperfect fabrication. Thermal tuning used in the experiment of this letter is the most common solution [10], [11], but it conflicts with the above mentioned passive routing property. Another approach to solve this problem is to locally trim the resonances of the MRRs.…”

“…1, the optical router has five bidirectional ports including East, South, West, North and Local ports. The Local port (Injection/Ejection) is connected with a tile and other four ports are connected with four neighboring nodes in the network [11]. The optical router comprises six waveguides, sixteen MRRs and two waveguide terminators.…”

“…The switching elements generally adopt microring resonators (MRRs) or Mach-Zehnder interferometers, while the more important work is the topology design for the optical router. Previously we have demonstrated two optical routers based on MRRs [10], [11]. Here, we present a new five-port optical router employing a different topology that has been optimized for large-scale mesh and torus networks.…”

“…Here, we present a new five-port optical router employing a different topology that has been optimized for large-scale mesh and torus networks. Compared with the previously reported in [11], the optical router is designed to passively route the optical signal travelling in one direction. The passive routing property guarantees that the maximum power consumption to guide the signal through a mesh network is a constant independent of the network size while using XY dimension-order routing [13].…”

Development trends in silicon photonics

“…6. Yang's group also demonstrated microring-resonatorbased four-port and five-port optical routers for photonic networks-on-chip (NoC) [43,44] . They also proposed a universal method to construct scalable N-port non-blocking optical router for photonic NoC [45] .…”