Ultra-compact and low loss silicon-photonic rearrangeable non-blocking perfect shuffle-exchange network

Abstract

The perfect shuffle-exchange network (PSEN) is a widely used optical network-on-chip topology. In this study, we designed a kind of rearrangeable and ultra-compact PSEN, which contains three ultra-compact components: left perfect shuffle, left inverse perfect shuffle, and 2 × 2 optical switch modules. They were then interconnected into a non-blocking 8 × 8 PSEN. The size of the entire optical PSEN module reaches only 8 µm × 87.6 µm ≈ 700 µm2, which is approximately 1000 times smaller than existing optical network-on-chip (ONoC) architectures (usual mm2 level). When signals with different wavelengths are input into different channels, the highest insertion loss in the valuable C-band is − 1.1 dB, its lowest value is − 0.7 dB, the maximum insertion loss fluctuation is only 0.4 dB, and the average crosstalk is maintained at approximately − 28 dB. This PSEN could have wide applications in nanophotonics computation and nanophotonics networks.