Five-Port Optical Router Based on Microring Switches for Photonic Networks-on-Chip

We demonstrate a five-port optical router that is suitable for large-scale photonic networks-on-chip. The optical router is designed to passively route the optical signal travelling in one direction and actively route the optical signal making a turn. In the case that an XY dimension-order routing is used, the passive routing feature guarantees that the maximum power consumption to route the data through the network is a constant that is independent of the network size. The fabricated device has an efficient footprint of ~ 460 × 1000 μm². The routing functionality of the device is verified by using a 12.5-Gbit/s optical signal. The capability of multiwavlength routing for the optical router is also explored and discussed.