Multipurpose silicon photonics signal processor core

By Daniel Pérez, I. Gasulla, L. Crudgington, D. Thomson, A. Khokhar, Ke Li, W. Cao, Goran Z. Mashanovich, José Capmany. Nature Communications, 2017

502 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Integrated photonics changes the scaling laws of information and communication systems offering architectural choices that combine photonics with electronics to optimize performance, power, footprint, and cost. Application-specific photonic integrated circuits, where particular circuits/chips are designed to optimally perform particular functionalities, require a considerable number of design and fabrication iterations leading to long development times. A different approach inspired by electronic Field Programmable Gate Arrays is the programmable photonic processor, where a common hardware implemented by a two-dimensional photonic waveguide mesh realizes different functionalities through programming. Here, we report the demonstration of such reconfigurable waveguide mesh in silicon. We demonstrate over 20 different functionalities with a simple seven hexagonal cell structure, which can be applied to different fields including communications, chemical and biomedical sensing, signal processing, multiprocessor networks, and quantum information systems. Our work is an important step toward this paradigm. Integrated optical circuits today are typically designed for a few special functionalities and require complex design and development procedures. Here, the authors demonstrate a reconfigurable but simple silicon waveguide mesh with different functionalities.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c62632b2543eb0bbe8eeead95a264121a5240b5c

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Citations in the corpus

Programmable photonic circuits (2020, methodology): “Compared to forward-only meshes, these meshes allow delays of discrete lengths (whole number of segments) to implement interferometric and resonant wavelength filters [5], [44].”
Photonic matrix multiplication lights up photonic accelerator and beyond (2022, background): “Other MZI meshes were also reported for multipurpose silicon photonics signal processors, such as a hexagon mesh 107 and a square mesh 108 .”