Integrated silicon optical switch for high-speed network-on-chip

Abstract

We propose a 4x4 small size optical mode switch applied for photonics integrated circuits. The proposed device consists of four Multimode Interference (MMI) couplers based on silicon material and ten phase shifters appropriately placed between ones. The fundamental modes at the input are selectively switched to the desired outputs by controlling the phase shifters. Through a beam propagation simulation method (BPM) combined with an effective index method (EIM), we evaluate the efficiency of optical conversion when transmitting signals from any input to arbitrary outputs of the device. At the center wavelength of 1.55 µm, the insertion loss is always less than 0.3 dB, and the crosstalk is always from -80 dB to -30 dB in the entire C-band.