Programmable SCOW Mesh Silicon Photonic Processor for Linear Unitary Operator

Liangjun Lu; Linjie Zhou; Jianping Chen

doi:10.3390/mi10100646

Programmable SCOW Mesh Silicon Photonic Processor for Linear Unitary Operator

Micromachines (Basel). 2019 Sep 26;10(10):646. doi: 10.3390/mi10100646.

Authors

Liangjun Lu¹, Linjie Zhou², Jianping Chen³

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Shanghai Key Lab of Navigation and Location Services, Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. luliangjun@sjtu.edu.cn.
² State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Shanghai Key Lab of Navigation and Location Services, Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. ljzhou@sjtu.edu.cn.
³ State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Shanghai Key Lab of Navigation and Location Services, Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China. jpchen62@sjtu.edu.cn.

Abstract

Universal unitary multiport interferometers (UMIs) can perform any arbitrary unitary transformation to a vector of input optical modes, which are essential for a wide range of applications. Most UMIs are realized by fixed photonic circuits with a triangular or a rectangular architecture. Here, we present the implementation of an N × N rectangular UMI with a programmable photonic processor based on two-dimensional meshes of self-coupled optical waveguide (SCOW) resonant structures. Our architecture shows a high tolerance to the unbalanced loss upon interference. This work enriches the functionality of the SCOW mesh photonic processors, which are promising for field-programmable photonic arrays.

Keywords: photonic processors; silicon photonics; unitary transformation.

Abstract

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