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      Multipurpose silicon photonics signal processor core

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          Abstract

          Integrated photonics changes the scaling laws of information and communication systems offering architectural choices that combine photonics with electronics to optimize performance, power, footprint, and cost. Application-specific photonic integrated circuits, where particular circuits/chips are designed to optimally perform particular functionalities, require a considerable number of design and fabrication iterations leading to long development times. A different approach inspired by electronic Field Programmable Gate Arrays is the programmable photonic processor, where a common hardware implemented by a two-dimensional photonic waveguide mesh realizes different functionalities through programming. Here, we report the demonstration of such reconfigurable waveguide mesh in silicon. We demonstrate over 20 different functionalities with a simple seven hexagonal cell structure, which can be applied to different fields including communications, chemical and biomedical sensing, signal processing, multiprocessor networks, and quantum information systems. Our work is an important step toward this paradigm.

          Abstract

          Integrated optical circuits today are typically designed for a few special functionalities and require complex design and development procedures. Here, the authors demonstrate a reconfigurable but simple silicon waveguide mesh with different functionalities.

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          Most cited references43

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          All-optical control of light on a silicon chip.

          Photonic circuits, in which beams of light redirect the flow of other beams of light, are a long-standing goal for developing highly integrated optical communication components. Furthermore, it is highly desirable to use silicon--the dominant material in the microelectronic industry--as the platform for such circuits. Photonic structures that bend, split, couple and filter light have recently been demonstrated in silicon, but the flow of light in these structures is predetermined and cannot be readily modulated during operation. All-optical switches and modulators have been demonstrated with III-V compound semiconductors, but achieving the same in silicon is challenging owing to its relatively weak nonlinear optical properties. Indeed, all-optical switching in silicon has only been achieved by using extremely high powers in large or non-planar structures, where the modulated light is propagating out-of-plane. Such high powers, large dimensions and non-planar geometries are inappropriate for effective on-chip integration. Here we present the experimental demonstration of fast all-optical switching on silicon using highly light-confining structures to enhance the sensitivity of light to small changes in refractive index. The transmission of the structure can be modulated by up to 94% in less than 500 ps using light pulses with energies as low as 25 pJ. These results confirm the recent theoretical prediction of efficient optical switching in silicon using resonant structures.
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            The Past, Present, and Future of Silicon Photonics

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              Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light.

              Data transport across short electrical wires is limited by both bandwidth and power density, which creates a performance bottleneck for semiconductor microchips in modern computer systems--from mobile phones to large-scale data centres. These limitations can be overcome by using optical communications based on chip-scale electronic-photonic systems enabled by silicon-based nanophotonic devices. However, combining electronics and photonics on the same chip has proved challenging, owing to microchip manufacturing conflicts between electronics and photonics. Consequently, current electronic-photonic chips are limited to niche manufacturing processes and include only a few optical devices alongside simple circuits. Here we report an electronic-photonic system on a single chip integrating over 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components that work together to provide logic, memory, and interconnect functions. This system is a realization of a microprocessor that uses on-chip photonic devices to directly communicate with other chips using light. To integrate electronics and photonics at the scale of a microprocessor chip, we adopt a 'zero-change' approach to the integration of photonics. Instead of developing a custom process to enable the fabrication of photonics, which would complicate or eliminate the possibility of integration with state-of-the-art transistors at large scale and at high yield, we design optical devices using a standard microelectronics foundry process that is used for modern microprocessors. This demonstration could represent the beginning of an era of chip-scale electronic-photonic systems with the potential to transform computing system architectures, enabling more powerful computers, from network infrastructure to data centres and supercomputers.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                jcapmany@iteam.upv.es
                Journal
                Nat Commun
                Nat Commun
                Nature Communications
                Nature Publishing Group UK (London )
                2041-1723
                21 September 2017
                21 September 2017
                2017
                : 8
                : 636
                Affiliations
                [1 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1770 5832, GRID grid.157927.f, ITEAM Research Institute, , Universitat Politècnica de València, ; Camino de Vera s/n, Valencia, 46022 Spain
                [2 ]ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9297, GRID grid.5491.9, Optoelectronics Research Centre, , University of Southampton, ; Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UK
                [3 ]ISNI 0000 0001 2166 9385, GRID grid.7149.b, School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, ; 11120 Belgrade, Serbia
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1431-7060
                Article
                714
                10.1038/s41467-017-00714-1
                5608755
                28935924
                107cbcd1-bbca-47c5-8ef0-64be86dcb08e
                © The Author(s) 2017

                Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 13 April 2017
                : 23 July 2017
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