32 × 32 silicon electro-optic switch with built-in monitors and balanced-status units.
To construct large-scale silicon electro-optical switches for optical interconnections, we developed a method using a limited number of power monitors inserted at certain positions to detect and determine the optimum operating points of all switch units to eliminate non-uniform effects arising from fabrication errors. We also introduced an optical phase bias to one phase-shifter arm of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI)-type switch unit to balance the two operation statuses of a silicon electro-optical switch during push-pull operation. With these methods, a 32 × 32 MZI-based silicon electro-optical switch was successfully fabricated with 180-nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process technology, which is the largest scale silicon electro-optical switch to the best of our knowledge. At a wavelength of 1520 nm, the on-chip insertion losses were 12.9 to 16.5 dB, and the crosstalk ranged from -17.9 to -24.8 dB when all units were set to the 'Cross' status. The losses were 14.4 to 18.5 dB, and the crosstalk ranged from -15.1 to -19.0 dB when all units were in the 'Bar' status. The total power consumptions of the 32 × 32 switch were 247.4 and 542.3 mW when all units were set to the 'Cross' and 'Bar' statuses, respectively.
State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China.|State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China.
Lei
L
Qiao
State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China.|State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China.
Weijie
W
Tang
State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China.|College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, 310027, China.|State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China.
Tao
T
Chu