A highly scalable fully non-blocking silicon photonic switch fabric

Abstract

Large port count spatial optical switches will facilitate flexible and energy efficient data movement in future data communications systems, especially if they are capable of nanosecond-order reconfiguration times. In this work, we demonstrate an 8x8 microring-based silicon photonic switch with software controlled switching. The proposed switch architecture is modular as it assembles multiple identical components with multiplexing/demultiplexing functionalities. The switch is fully non-blocking, has path independent insertion loss, low crosstalk and is straightforward to control. A scalability analysis shows that this architecture can scale to very large port counts. This work represents the first demonstration of real-time firmware controlled switching with silicon photonics devices integrated at the chip scale.