A 3.9ns 8.9mW 4x4 silicon photonic switch hybrid integrated with CMOS driver

Abstract

The emerging field of silicon photonics [1-3] targets monolithic integration of optical components in the CMOS process, potentially enabling high bandwidth, high density interconnects with dramatically reduced cost and power dissipation. A broadband photonic switch is a key component of reconfigurable networks which retain data in the optical domain, thus bypassing the latency, bandwidth and power overheads of opto-electronic conversion. Additionally, with WDM channels, multiple data streams can be routed simultaneously using a single optical device. Although many types of discrete silicon photonic switches have been reported [4-6], very few of them have been shown to operate with CMOS drivers. Earlier, we have reported two different 2x2 optical switches wirebond packaged with 90nm CMOS drivers [7,8]. The 2x2 switch reported in [7] is based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), while the one reported in [8] is based on a two-ring resonator. © 2011 IEEE.