Reduce Loss and Crosstalk in Integrated Silicon-Photonic Multistage Switching Fabrics Through Multichip Partition

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of data-intensive applications in data centers, the switching fabric in the internode network becomes significant. Silicon-photonic switching fabrics have a bright future in data centers, which offer high bandwidth, high energy efficiency, and low latency. However, integrating a high radix multistage switching fabric in a single chip faces challenges. A large number of waveguide crossings on the silicon photonic die causes massive power loss and introduces a tremendous amount of crosstalk noise. In this article, we propose a chip partition optimization platform (POP), which can decrease the number of waveguide crossings and shorten the on-chip traversal distance of optical signals. Our algorithms can effectively reduce the power loss and crosstalk noise in silicon-photonic multistage switching fabrics, and help to improve the signal integrity. For example, compared with the common design, POP can achieve 33-dB improvement on average power loss, 42-dB improvement on the worst-case power loss, and 39-dB improvement on the worst-case signal to noise ratio, in a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1024\times1024$ </tex-math></inline-formula> butterfly based silicon-photonic switching fabric.