Scalable simulation of programmable photonic integrated waveguide meshs

Abstract

Programmable photonic integrated waveguide mesh (PPIWM), which is similar to the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) in electronics, can be reconfigured to form a variety of mesh topologies to provide different signal processing functions flexibly. With the development of large-scale PPIWM, multipath routing is becoming more and more complex. Automatic and efficient calculation of the transmission characteristics between arbitrary input and output ports is very essential to realize the simulation and theoretical analysis task for the PPIWMs. In this paper, a simple and effective calculation method for the transmission characteristics of PPIWMs with any scale is proposed. Comparedwiththeavailabletechnologies, this method can greatly reduce the time of solving the total scattering matrix in the large-scale PPIWM and has the advantage of easy programming. Typical simulation examples are given to verify the effectiveness of this method. The generalityandhighefficiency of this method can help us analyze increasingly large and complex reconfigurable photonic circuits with a wide variety of functions.