Cascaded active silicon microresonator array cross-connect circuits for WDM networks-on-chip

We propose a design of an optical switch on a silicon chip comprising a 5 x 5 array of cascaded waveguide-crossing-coupled microring resonator-based switches for photonic networks-on-chip applications. We adopt our recently demonstrated design of multimode-interference (MMI)-based wire waveguide crossings, instead of conventional plain waveguide crossings, for the merits of low loss and low crosstalk. The microring resonator is integrated with a lateral p-i-n diode for carrier-injection-based GHz-speed on-off switching. All 25 microring resonators are assumed to be identical within a relatively wide resonance line width. The optical circuit switch can employ a single wavelength channel or multiple wavelength channels that are spaced by the microring resonator free spectral range. We analyze the potential performance of the proposed photonic network in terms of (i) light path cross-connections loss budget, and (ii) DC on-off power consumption for establishing a light path. As a proof-of-concept, our initial experiments on cascaded passive silicon MMI-crossing-coupled microring resonators demonstrate 3.6-Gbit/s non-return-to-zero data transmissions at on- and off-resonance wavelengths.