Four-Port Silicon Multi-Wavelength Optical Router for Photonic Networks-on-Chip

We design and fabricate a four-port wavelength-selective optical router on silicon-on-insulator wafer for photonic networks-on-chip. The router consists of four basic operation blocks. Each is constructed by one microring resonator (MRR) based add-drop filter rather than the traditional two microrings based 2 × 2 optical crossbar. It can provide multiwavelength routing for each path to increase the aggregate data transmission bandwidth. The possible 12 I/O routing paths are experimentally observed in the transmission spectra and each of them has the ability to route four group wavelengths simultaneously in the measured spectral range. The device has a small footprint ( ~ 78×100 μm²) and low power consumption (6.58 mW).