Robust calibration and energy optimization in reconfigurable photonic processors
Igor A. Litvin, Gökhan Elmas, Kareem El-Safty, Sumit Chaudhary, Janis Nötzel · Optics Express · 2025
Reconfigurable photonic processors suffer performance loss from fabrication tolerances, thermal drift, and other phase- and amplitude-error sources. We introduce an energy-aware calibration routine that simultaneously restores accuracy and minimizes heater power. After output-channel normalization, every Mach-Zehnder interferometer and external phase shifter is retuned by fitting measured transfer matrices to theory, halving the error in a 4 × 4 Hadamard-transform test. Three complementary optimizations-a global phase offset, selection of the lower-voltage branch for each SU(2) rotation, and permutation of matrix rows-substantially reduce total electrical power without degrading fidelity. This precision, power-conscious calibration removes a key obstacle to scalable, high-performance photonic computing systems.