Integrated Reconfigurable Silicon Photonics Switch Matrix in IRIS Project: Technological Achievements and Experimental Results

This paper reports the performances of a silicon photonics optical switch matrix fabricated by using large scale 3D integration. The wavelength selective optical switch consists of a photonic integrated circuit (PIC), with 1398 circuit elements, interconnected in a 3D stack with its control electronic integrated circuit (EIC). Each PIC element can be trimmed or reconfigured by using metallic heaters. The EIC is designed to drive the heaters and to read the signal of monitor photodiodes integrated into the PIC. Small footprint and high energy efficiency are achieved in the PIC and the EIC. Automatic wavelength alignment of the optical circuits in the PIC to the ITU grid and fine temperature tuning of each photonic element to optimize the switch insertion losses are obtained by an optimization routine. A fully packaged switch with input/output fibers is tested both for optical and electrical characteristics as well as for the system performances. Fiber to fiber insertion losses of about 20 dB and channel isolation of -35 dB are achieved. BER characteristics at 25 Gbps are evaluated. Perspective applications of the optical switch in optical transport and intra-data center networks are discussed

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