Photonic chips are becoming increasingly complex, combining even more optical building blocks on the same chip. With this growing complexity we also see an expanding need for, and use of electrical tuning. This imposes opportunities, as photonic circuits can now become reconfigurable at run time, even to the point of creating arbitrary connectivity between functional building blocks, serving as a general-purpose optical processor. But at the same time, large-scale configurability comes with some tremendous challenges in terms of power consumption, electrical and optical packaging, driver electronics and control algorithms. We will discuss our recent progress in these domains in our path to building general-purpose programmable photonic chips. Expanding silicon photonics with high-efficiency electro-optic tuners, high-density packaging solutions, and electronics and software layers to govern the behavior of these photonic circuits that can be used for both photonic and microwave analog signal processing.
We give an overview the progress of our work in silicon photonic programmable circuits, covering the technology stack from the photonic chip over the driver electronics, packaging technologies all the way to the software layers. On the photonic side, we show our recent results in large-scale silicon photonic circuits with different tuning technologies, including heaters, MEMS and liquid crystals, and their respective electronic driving schemes. We look into the scaling potential of these different technologies as the number of tunable elements in a circuit increases. Finally, we elaborate on the software routines for routing and filter synthesis to enable the photonic programmer.
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