Optical routers for photonic networks-on-chip

We experimentally demonstrated four- and five-port non-blocking optical routers for photonic networks-on-chip. The optical routers are based on cascaded microring resonators. New topology design reduces the number of microring resonators and crossings, improving the performances in terms of tuning power consumption, optical loss, crosstalk and channel uniformity of the optical routers. The efficient footprints are 300x340 mu m(2) and 440x660 mu m(2) for four- and five-port optical routers, respectively. Static spectrum tests show that the 3-dB bandwidths are larger than 0.12 nm and 0.31 nm, the extinction ratios are larger than 13 dB and 20 dB for through ports, 30 dB and 16 dB for drop ports, for four- and five-port optical routers, respectively. Moreover, routing functionality and signal integrity are verified by 12.5 Gbps high-speed signal transmission experiments using the NRZ 2(31-1) PRBS pattern.