Integrated five-port non-blocking optical router based on mode-selective property

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a five-port optical router based on mode-selective property. It utilizes different combinations of four spatial modes at input and output ports as labels to distinguish its 20 routing paths. It can direct signals from the source port to the destination port intelligently without power consumption and additional switching time to realize various path steering. The proposed architecture is constructed by asymmetric directional coupler based mode-multiplexers/de-multiplexers, multimode interference based waveguide crossings and single-mode interconnect waveguides. The broad optical bandwidths of these constituents make the device suitable to combine with wavelength division multiplexing signal transmission, which can effectively increase the data throughput. Measurement results show that the insertion loss of its 20 routing paths are lower than 8.5 dB and the optical signal-to-noise ratios are larger than 16.3 dB at 1525–1565 nm. To characterize its routing functionality, a 40-Gbps data transmission with bit-error-rate (BER) measurement is implemented. The power penalties for the error-free switching (BER<10−9) are 1.0 dB and 0.8 dB at 1545 nm and 1565 nm, respectively.

A compact 1×3 two-mode selective silicon photonic router/switch using two tunable phase shifters

“…Besides, currently, an on-chip MDM system, especially CMOS-compatible silicon-based MDM systems, is preferable to provide a possible way for the large-scale high-capacity data exchange in data communication networks (DCNs) [17] due to utilizing significant highlights of silicon photonics, such as high compactness, low loss, broad-spectrum response, reasonable manufacturing cost. Silicon photonics-based MDM devices also play the important roles to construct chip-scale systems through many photonic mode division signal processing functionalities, such as mode (de)multiplexing [18][19][20][21], mode add/drop multiplexing [22,23], mode conversion [24,25], mode routing [26,27], and mode switching [28][29][30][31]. It is seen that since the thermooptic (TO) effect has been widely applied to control the phase angle of light when traveling through the silicon waveguides [31,32], the MDM devices based on the SOI platform could operate much more flexibly via the phase-driven process by manipulating metallic microheaters.…”