Optical Switches Based on Silicon Photonics for ROADM Application

Abstract

We demonstrate compact and low-loss 8 × 8 silicon photonic switch modules, which are applicable to transponder aggregators (TPAs) in colorless, directionless, and contentionless reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers. Newly designed silicon optical switch chips incorporating spot size converters with polarization insensitive and wavelength insensitive properties over C/L bands are packaged. The developed module shows about 6-dB average excess optical loss, including optical coupling loss, on all 64 optical paths with low-polarization-dependent loss and low crosstalk. Using these compact optical switch modules, we construct a TPA prototype featuring over 100-port optical switch subsystem densely mounted on one board and confirm its feasibility.