Four-Port Optical Switch for Fat-Tree Photonic Network-on-Chip

Abstract

We demonstrate a four-port optical switch for the fat-tree photonic network-on-chip architecture, which contains four silicon Mach–Zehnder optical switch elements tuned by the plasma dispersion effect. The optical signal-to-noise ratio of the device is over 10.0 dB in the wavelength range from 1525 to 1565 nm. The routing functionality of the device is verified and 50- × 32-Gb/s wavelength-division-multiplexing data transmission for one optical link is demonstrated. The rise and fall times (10%–90% and 90%–10%) of the optical switch element are both ∼2 ns. The average power consumption of the device is ∼56.8 mW.