Abstract:We demonstrate a record-high extinction-ratio of 50.4 dB in a 2 × 2 silicon Mach-Zehnder switch equipped with a variable splitter as the front 3-dB splitter. The variable splitter is adjusted to compensate for the splitting-ratio mismatch between the front and rear 3-dB splitters. The high extinction ratio does not rely on waveguide crossings and meets a strong demand in applications to multiport circuit switches. Large fabrication tolerance will make the high extinction ratio compatible with a volume producti… Show more
“…The power consumption can be reduced to 24.9 mW by introducing the silica trench in the MMI structure but at expenses of a higher switching time of 4.25 µs (P π ·τ≈108 mW·µs). Overall, the obtained results outperform the performance of MZI switches based also on the placement the heaters on top of the cladding layer [6,9,12]. The best obtained figure of merit is also comparable to thermo-optic MZI switches based on doping the silicon to directly build the heaters into the waveguide (P π ·τ≈67 mW·µs in [11]).…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 62%
“…Furthermore, an additional tuning mechanism, which will increase the total power consumption, is also necessary to counteract possible fabrication deviations [5]. On the other hand, silicon MZI switches have a wider optical bandwidth and higher robustness but usually suffer from a larger footprint and higher power consumption that limits the scalability to build switching fabrics with a large number of ports [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”
2 is proposed and demonstrated. The MMI structure has been optimized using a silica trench acting as a thermal isolator without introducing any substantial loss penalty or crosstalk degradation. Furthermore, the electrodes performance have significantly been improved via engineering the heater geometry and using two metallization steps. Thereby, a drastic power consumption reduction of around 90% has been demonstrated yielding to values as low as 24.9 mW. Furthermore, very fast switching times of only 1.19 µs have also been achieved.
“…The power consumption can be reduced to 24.9 mW by introducing the silica trench in the MMI structure but at expenses of a higher switching time of 4.25 µs (P π ·τ≈108 mW·µs). Overall, the obtained results outperform the performance of MZI switches based also on the placement the heaters on top of the cladding layer [6,9,12]. The best obtained figure of merit is also comparable to thermo-optic MZI switches based on doping the silicon to directly build the heaters into the waveguide (P π ·τ≈67 mW·µs in [11]).…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 62%
“…Furthermore, an additional tuning mechanism, which will increase the total power consumption, is also necessary to counteract possible fabrication deviations [5]. On the other hand, silicon MZI switches have a wider optical bandwidth and higher robustness but usually suffer from a larger footprint and higher power consumption that limits the scalability to build switching fabrics with a large number of ports [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”
2 is proposed and demonstrated. The MMI structure has been optimized using a silica trench acting as a thermal isolator without introducing any substantial loss penalty or crosstalk degradation. Furthermore, the electrodes performance have significantly been improved via engineering the heater geometry and using two metallization steps. Thereby, a drastic power consumption reduction of around 90% has been demonstrated yielding to values as low as 24.9 mW. Furthermore, very fast switching times of only 1.19 µs have also been achieved.
“…Using optimized beam-splitters BSL and BSR, we then implement the MZI with the ultra-high extinction ratio of 60.5 dB, making a new record on silicon integrated photonics device. The best previous result reported is 50.4 dB where the device consists of only one variable beam-splitter [5]. Considering the limits of the measurement apparatus in our current experimental setup-the voltage driver's resolution is limited to 0.005V -a more precise result with higher extinction ratio can be obtained using a higher resolution voltage driver.…”
Abstract:We demonstrate an ultra-high extinction MZI on a reconfigurable silicon photonic chip, using a self-optimising approach to adjust variable beam-splitters. This result paves the way for large-scale integrated photonic quantum information applications.
“…This should be considered when scaling up the number of ports in a switch matrix in which having a reproducible elementary switching element is critical to guarantee low insertion loss and crosstalk for the fabric. In order to fully benefit from the broadband design in a large optical switch matrix, tunable BBC [27] capable of trimming the phase with good thermooptic efficiency may be required.…”
We present the design, fabrication, and measurement results of low-insertion-loss and low-crosstalk broadband 2 × 2 Mach-Zehnder switches for nanosecond-scale optical data routing applications. We propose a simulation framework to calculate the spectral characteristics of switches and use it to design two switches: one based on directional couplers, the other using two-section directional couplers for broader bandwidth. We show that driving the switch in a push-pull manner enables to reduce insertion loss and optical crosstalk at the expense of the optical bandwidth. We achieve a good correlation between simulations and devices fabricated in IBM's 90-nm photonics-enabled CMOS process. We demonstrate a push-pull drive switch with insertion loss of ∼1 dB and an optical crosstalk smaller than −23 dB over a 45-nm optical bandwidth in the O-band. We further achieve a transition time of ∼4 ns with an average phase shifter consumption of 1 mW and a heater efficiency of ∼25 mW/π.
Index Terms-Optical switches, photonic integrated circuits.
0733-8724
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