Scalable Nonblocking 4 x 4 Silicon Optical Switch Based on Dual-Microring Resonators

We demonstrate a reconfigurable 4 x 4 silicon optical switch network by using an architecture of Half-Crossbar. It has the advantage of flexible scalability and utilizes fewer elements. The proposed switch is composed of six dual-microring resonators tuned by the thermo-optic effect. The footprint is only 176 mu m x 632 mu m. At the wavelength of 1557 nm, the average insertion loss is smaller than 2.5 dB according to the results of all 24 switching states. Its rising response time is about 4.9 mu s. The experiment verified the optical data transmission ability of the proposed switch network.