Scaling programmable silicon photonics circuits
Wim Bogaerts, K. P. Nagarjun, Lukas Van Iseghem, Xiangfeng Chen, Hong Deng, Iman Zand, Yu Zhang, Yichen Liu, Alain Yuji Takabayashi, Hamed Sattari, Niels Quack, Pierre Edinger, Gaehun Jo, Simon J. Bleiker, Kristinn B. Gylfason, Frank Niklaus, Arun Kumar Mallik, Moises A. Jezzini, Cleitus Antony, Giuseppe Talli · 2023
We give an overview the progress of our work in silicon photonic programmable circuits, covering the technology stack from the photonic chip over the driver electronics, packaging technologies all the way to the software layers. On the photonic side, we show our recent results in large-scale silicon photonic circuits with different tuning technologies, including heaters, MEMS and liquid crystals, and their respective electronic driving schemes. We look into the scaling potential of these different technologies as the number of tunable elements in a circuit increases. Finally, we elaborate on the software routines for routing and filter synthesis to enable the photonic programmer.