16×16 Silicon Electro-optic Switch Based On Dual-ring Assisted Mach-zehnder Interferometer

With people's growing demand for higher speed of network,data center will encounter higher increase of data traffic between its servers.To tackle with this problem,data center needs a new generation of technology to provide higher speed,lower latency,lower power consumption of all-optical switching networks.Silicon photonics with its key merits of compatibility with microelectronic circuits,compact size,low cost,lower power consumption and fast response,offers the potential to enable next generation high speed optical switching networks.Meanwhile,high performance computing system requiring multi-processor to work in a parallel way would greatly benefit from such all-optical switches.In the work of this dissertation,a 16×16 silicon electro-optic switch based on Benes architecture is proposed.The switch adopts dual-ring assisted Mach-Zehnder interferometers(DR-MZIs)as the basic building blocks.As DR-MZI is an resonant structure,we embedded the switching elements with TiN heaters and p-i-n diodes for resonance alignment and fast switching,respectively.Based on transfer matrix function,the spectra,group delay and dispersion of the 16×16 switch are analyzed.The 16?16 switch is characterized by measuring the optical transmission spectra and quadrature phase-shift keying(QPSK)data transmission through 16 representative optical paths.The insertion loss of the entire switch chip is 10.6±1.7 dB and the crosstalk is less than-20.5 dB.The average switching power consumption of the chip is 0.34 mW.The 32 Gb/s QPSK is successfully switched to different destination ports by reconfiguring the optical paths,verifying the signal integrity after switching.The switching time experiment proves that the switch has nanosecond scale switching ability.