Non-volatile FPPGA implementation of photonic systems
Govindan Nishi Nampoothiri, Viswas Sadasivan · Journal of the Optical Society of America B · 2026
Field-programmable photonic gate arrays (FPPGAs) are reconfigurable platforms used in photonic systems. They consist of tunable basic units (TBU) that can be tuned in cross, bar, and various intermediate states. Existing tuning mechanisms are volatile and require a continuous power supply. This work proposes and models photonic systems implemented on non-volatile FPPGAs. An optical phase change material-based non-volatile TBU in various states was modeled using scattering parameters that were extracted through a field simulation. Further, the TBUs were interconnected using the scattering matrices of the S- and arc-waveguides to complete the full hexagonal mesh-based FPPGA in a standard graphical programming environment. This model was further used to analyze the performance of novel, to our knowledge, non-volatile FPPGA-based implementations of common optical power dividers/combiners and path switches. The model predicts system characteristics, including insertion loss, extinction ratio, and crosstalk. This work also proposes novel implementations of weighted sum networks and programmable linear optics-based digital logic in nonvolatile FPPGAs. The study compares the performance of the proposed non-volatile FPPGA implementations with volatile counterparts and establishes clear benefits of using non-volatile FPPGAs in systems requiring power savings. The proposed model and non-volatile FPPGA system are expected to advance all-optical computing, photonic sensing, high-speed optical communication, and artificial neural networks.