A silicon Mach Zehnder comb switch for low power operation in on-chip optical data communications

Abstract

A novel method to significantly decrease power consumption in a silicon switch based on an asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) structure is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. A radical power consumption reduction up to 50% is achieved for switching digital data at bit rates from 10 to 30Gbps with respect to a conventional switch based on a symmetric MZI. Furthermore, the broadband performance of the proposed silicon MZI comb switch is also demonstrated by transmitting a 120 Gbps DWDM data stream.