Large-scale optical switches by thermo-optic waveguide lens

Optical switches are desired in telecom and datacom as an upgrade to electrical ones for lower power consumption and expenses while improving bandwidth and network transparency. Compact, integrated optical switches are attractive thanks to their scalability, readiness for mass production, and robustness against mechanical disturbances. The basic unit relies mostly on a microring resonator or a Mach-Zehnder interferometer for binary "bar" and "cross" switching. Such single-mode structures are often wavelength / polarization dependent, sensitive to phase errors and loss-prone. Furthermore, when they are cascaded to a network, the number of control units grows quickly with the port count, causing high complexity in electronic wiring and drive circuit integration. Herein, we propose a new switching method by thermo-optic waveguide lens. Essentially, this multimode waveguide forms a square law medium by a pair of heater electrodes and focuses light within a chip by robust 1 x 1 imaging. A 1 x 24 basic switch is demonstrated with 32 electrodes and only two are biased at a time for a chosen output. By two-level cascading, the switch expands to 576 ports and only four electrodes are needed for one path. The chips are fabricated on wafer scale in a low-budget laboratory without resorting to foundries. Yet, the performance goes beyond state of the art for low insertion loss, low wavelength dependence and low polarization dependence. This work provides an original, alternative, and practical route to construct large-scale optical switches, enabling broad applications in telecom, datacom and photonic computing.