Silicon Photonic Flex-LIONS for Bandwidth-Reconfigurable Optical Interconnects

• Published in: IEEE journal of selected topics in quantum electronics Vol. 26; no. 2; pp. 1 - 10
• Main Authors: Xiao, Xian, Proietti, Roberto, Liu, Gengchen, Lu, Hongbo, Fotouhi, Pouya, Werner, Sebastian, Zhang, Yu, Yoo, S. J. Ben
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Architecture; Arrayed waveguide grating router; Arrayed waveguide gratings; Bandwidth; Bandwidths; Energy efficiency; Fabrics; Insertion loss; Multicast; optical interconnections; Optical interconnects; Optical switches; photonic integrated circuits; Photonics; Ports; Power efficiency; Reconfiguration; Silicon; silicon photonics; Switches; Switching; Topology; Waveguide routers; Wavelength routeing
• ISSN: 1077-260X; 1558-4542
• DOI: 10.1109/JSTQE.2019.2950770

This paper reports the first experimental demonstration of silicon photonic (SiPh) Flex-LIONS, a bandwidth-reconfigurable SiPh switching fabric based on wavelength routing in arrayed waveguide grating routers (AWGRs) and space switching. Compared with the state-of-the-art bandwidth-reconfigurable switching fabrics, Flex-LIONS architecture exhibits 21× less number of switching elements and 2.9× lower on-chip loss for 64 ports, which indicates significant improvements in scalability and energy efficiency. System experimental results carried out with an 8-port SiPh Flex-LIONS prototype demonstrate error-free one-to-eight multicast interconnection at 25 Gb/s and bandwidth reconfiguration from 25 Gb/s to 100 Gb/s between selected input and output ports. Besides, benchmarking simulation results show that Flex-LIONS can provide a 1.33× reduction in packet latency and >1.5× improvements in energy efficiency when replacing the core layer switches of Fat-Tree topologies with Flex-LIONS. Finally, we discuss the possibility of scaling Flex-LIONS up to N = 1024 ports (N = M × W) by arranging M 2 W-port Flex-LIONS in a Thin-CLOS architecture using W wavelengths.