Integrated Dynamic Wavelength Division Multiplexed FBG Sensors Interrogator on a Silicon Photonic Chip

A wavelength division multiplexed fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors interrogator using an integrated unbalanced Mach–Zehnder interferometer followed by an arrayed waveguide grating on silicon-on-insulator platform is presented. The Bragg wavelength-shift is determined through the phase-generated carrier demodulation technique, allowing accurate dynamic FBG interrogation. The performance of the proposed device was validated by comparing the measurements with a commercial FBG readout unit based on a spectrometer, serving as a reference. Experimental results demonstrate a dynamic strain resolution of 4.56 nε/√Hz and minimum detectable strain down to ~0.49 µε at 1-kHz bandwidth

Demonstration and Fabrication Tolerance Study of Temperature-Insensitive Silicon-Photonic MZI Tunable by a Metal Heater

International audienceWe present a temperature-insensitive tunable silicon-photonic Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) filter fabricated by deep ultraviolet lithography. The wavelength shift of the MZI filter depending on temperature is reduced down to -4 pm/degrees C at similar to 1480 nm using a design with waveguide narrowing and widening, and the MZI filter is tunable with a thermal heater at an efficiency of 24 mW/free spectral range (FSR). The FSR of the MZI is about 5.8 nm, which corresponds to a channel spacing of 2.9 nm for a two-channel MZI. We discuss the fabrication tolerance of the fabricated MZI according to experimental and simulation results and show design parameters for a fabrication-tolerant temperature-insensitive MZI with a 20-nm channel spacing for coarse wavelength-division multiplexing application

A 3D photonic-electronic integrated transponder aggregator with 48×16 heater control cells

An electronic integrated circuit (EIC) and a silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) are three-dimensional (3D)- integrated. The EIC using the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) part of STMicroelectronics’ BCD8sp 0.16μm technology controls all 768 switches in the PIC individually and monitors them with 84 transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs). A scalable analog-digital approach with a cell size of 100×100μm² for thermal control of optical ring resonator switch matrices is introduced. An electrical power consumption of 220mW for all electronic control circuits of the optical swi tch matrix is resulting in 5.5% of the power needed by a constant-voltage control approach

Integrated, scalable and reconfigurable silicon photonics based optical switch for colorless, directionless and contentionless operation

We demonstrate a BCD8sP electronic-photonic integrated device for low cost, low power, and mass-manufacturable optical switching. Our network on-chip has one thousand photonic components, each driven by a dedicated electronic control circuit. The architecture implements a transponder aggregator scheme that manages 12 200GHz-spaced wavelengths in 4 different directions and 8 add/drop ports. The 3D integration of the photonic and the electronic chips allows the complete system reconfiguration at microsecond regime. The packaged device shows a total insertion loss of-22dB, including input and output coupling, and a channel isolation better than 35dB, in a device with a chip area of less than 1cm2