Six-port optical switch for cluster-mesh photonic network-on-chip

Nanophotonics

article

Hao Jia¹  Ting Zhou¹  Yunchou Zhao¹  Yuhao Xia¹  Jincheng Dai¹  Lei Zhang¹  Jianfeng Ding¹  Xin Fu¹  Lin Yang¹ 

[1] State Key Laboratory of Integrated Optoelectronics, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences;College of Materials Science and Opto-Electronic Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

关键词: optical interconnect;    optical switches;    wavelength-division multiplexing;    silicon photonics;   

DOI  :  10.1515/nanoph-2017-0116

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: De Gruyter

【 摘 要 】

Photonic network-on-chip for high-performance multi-core processors has attracted substantial interest in recent years as it offers a systematic method to meet the demand of large bandwidth, low latency and low power dissipation. In this paper we demonstrate a non-blocking six-port optical switch for cluster-mesh photonic network-on-chip. The architecture is constructed by substituting three optical switching units of typical Spanke-Benes network to optical waveguide crossings. Compared with Spanke-Benes network, the number of optical switching units is reduced by 20%, while the connectivity of routing path is maintained. By this way the footprint and power consumption can be reduced at the expense of sacrificing the network latency performance in some cases. The device is realized by 12 thermally tuned silicon Mach-Zehnder optical switching units. Its theoretical spectral responses are evaluated by establishing a numerical model. The experimental spectral responses are also characterized, which indicates that the optical signal-to-noise ratios of the optical switch are larger than 13.5 dB in the wavelength range from 1525 nm to 1565 nm. Data transmission experiment with the data rate of 32 Gbps is implemented for each optical link.

【 授权许可】

CC BY