KEYWORDS: Waveguides, Microelectromechanical systems, Phase shifts, Liquid crystals, Silicon photonics, Silicon, Photonic integrated circuits, Electrodes, Oxides, Back end of line
The demand for efficient actuators in photonics has peaked with increasing popularity for large-scale general-purpose programmable photonics circuits. We present our work to enhance an established silicon photonics platform with low-power micro-electromechanical (MEMS) and liquid crystal (LC) actuators to enable largescale programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs).
We give an overview the progress of our work in silicon photonic programmable circuits, covering the technology stack from the photonic chip over the driver electronics, packaging technologies all the way to the software layers. On the photonic side, we show our recent results in large-scale silicon photonic circuits with different tuning technologies, including heaters, MEMS and liquid crystals, and their respective electronic driving schemes. We look into the scaling potential of these different technologies as the number of tunable elements in a circuit increases. Finally, we elaborate on the software routines for routing and filter synthesis to enable the photonic programmer.
We present our work in the European project MORPHIC to extend an established silicon photonics platform with low-power and non-volatile micro-electromechanical (MEMS) actuators to demonstrate large-scale programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs).
We present our work to extend silicon photonics with MEMS actuators to enable low-power, large scale programmable photonic circuits. For this, we start from the existing iSiPP50G silicon photonics platform of IMEC, where we add free-standing movable waveguides using a few post-processing steps. This allows us to implement phase shifters and tunable couplers using electrostatically actuated MEMS, while at the same time maintaining all the original functionality of the silicon photonics platform. The MEMS devices are protected using a wafer-level sealing approach and interfaced with custom multi-channel driver and readout electronics.
In the European project MORPHIC we develop a platform for programmable silicon photonic circuits enabled by waveguide-integrated micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). MEMS can add compact, and low-power phase shifters and couplers to an established silicon photonics platform with high-speed modulators and detectors. This MEMS technology is used for a new class of programmable photonic circuits, that can be reconfigured using electronics and software, consisting of large interconnected meshes of phase shifters and couplers. MORPHIC is also developing the packaging and driver electronics interfacing schemes for such large circuits, creating a supply chain for rapid prototyping new photonic chip concepts. These will be demonstrated in different applications, such as switching, beamforming and microwave photonics.
The potential for sharing infrastructure costs between a large
number of customers and the high data rates allowed by optical
fibres make passive optical networks (PONs) an attractive solution
to the problem of upgrading current copper-based access networks.
Optically-amplified, long reach, time division multiple access
(TDMA) PONs or 'SuperPONs' offer the potential to further reduce bandwidth transport costs by enabling the direct connection of access networks and inner core networks, thereby eliminating the costs of the outer core/metro backhaul network. The use of dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) could also allow sharing the same feeder fibre and PON head end equipment between a number of such TDMA SuperPONs, each working at different ITU-grid wavelengths. However, a cost effective access solution should employ a customer optical network unit (ONU), which is independent of the PON wavelength, or colorless, in order to reduce the high inventory and deployment costs of using expensive, wavelength-specified sources at the customer. In this paper we demonstrate for the first time the use of a monolithically-integrated, electroabsorption modulator-semiconductor optical amplifiers (EAM-SOAs) as a colorless ONU in a high performance DWDM SuperPON system. These compact devices offer the potential for low-cost optoelectronic integration with other ONU components together with the ability to modulate at rates up to 10Gbps and beyond. We have used this approach to investigate the feasibility of supporting up to 17 SuperPONs from a single feeder fibre and PON head end, each of 100km-reach accommodating 512 users at 2.5Gb/s or 128 at 10Gb/s.
We use the transmission line modeling (TLM) technique to model the saturation of the gain in a microchannel plate. To this purpose we represent a generic channel multiplier by a distributed constant, unidimensional electrical network in which the internal structure of the channel wall is neglected. This network is analyzed with the TLM method, i.e. with the techniques developed for transmission lines and a simple system of time-dependent, nonlinear differential equations is derived. Then we consider the system in steady-state conditions and, by introducing a rational approximation of the nonlinear gain equation, we derive an exact analytical solution from which the gain and the voltage along the channel multiplier can be easily computed. Finally the model is used to fit a set of experimental data taken with a MCP photomultiplier, finding that the derived equations describe with satisfactory accuracy the measured data.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.