Abstract
Abstract The development of optical interconnect techniques greatly expands the communication bandwidth and decreases the power consumption at the same time. It provides a prospective solution for both intra-chip and inter-chip links. Herein reported is an integrated wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM)-compatible multimode optical switching system-on-chip (SoC) for large-capacity optical switching among processors. The interfaces for the input and output of the processor signals are electrical, and the on-chip data transmission and switching process are optical. It includes silicon-based microring optical modulator arrays, mode multiplexers/de-multiplexers, optical switches, microring wavelength de-multiplexers and germanium-silicon high-speed photodetectors. By introducing external multi-wavelength laser sources, the SoC achieved the function of on-chip WDM and mode-division multiplexing (MDM) hybrid-signal data transmission and switching on a standard silicon photonics platform. As a proof of concept, signals with a 25 Gbps data rate are implemented on each microring modulator of the fabricated SoC. We illustrated 25 × 3 × 2 Gbps on-chip data throughput with two-by-two multimode switching functionality through implementing three wavelength-channels and two mode-channel hybrid-multiplexed signals for each multimode transmission waveguide. The architecture of the SoC is flexible to scale, both for the number of supported processors and the data throughput. The demonstration paves the way to a large-capacity multimode optical switching SoC.
Highlights
The “big data era” poses a great challenge to the transmission and processing capabilities of massive data
Due to the low price, the compact device footprint and a high compatibility with the standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication process, a silicon photonics platform is considered to be excellent for implementing on-chip optical interconnects [6, 7]
We focus on the on-chip optical switching subsystem with electrical interfaces, as the rectangle region with dashed frames shows
Summary
The “big data era” poses a great challenge to the transmission and processing capabilities of massive data. Germanium photodetectors are available for on-chip integration [45,46,47] These devices lay a solid foundation for a multimode switching system, and a suitable architecture is in great demand to realize large capacity and channel-scalable on-chip communication. By introducing the external wavelength-multiplexed carriers, it is capable of realizing on-chip data transmission and switching function including high-speed parallel optical signal modulation, WDM-compatible mode multiplexing/ de-multiplexing, multimode data transmission, multimode signal switching and conversion process from optical to electrical signals. Through three wavelength-channels and two mode-channels hybrid multiplexing, we illustrated 25 × 3 × 2 Gbps on-chip data throughput in multimode waveguides, with a two-by-two switching functionality
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