Reconfigurable Silicon Photonics: Devices and Circuits

As the link capacity increases dramatically, it is also becoming more and more important to develop smart photonic networks-on-chip so that the bandwidth/channels can be utilized optimally and flexibly. One of the keys for realizing smart (reconfigurable) photonic networks is reconfigurable photonic integrated devices and circuits. As silicon has a large thermo-optic (TO) coefficient as well as a high heat conductivity, it is promising to realize efficient thermally-reconfigurable silicon photonic integrated devices and circuits with simple fabrication processes. This paper gives a review of our recent work on reconfigurable photonic integrated devices and circuits on silicon, including: (1) tunable microring-resonator (MRR)-based optical filters; (2) ultra-broadband optical switches; (3) monolithically-integrated reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs) for wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM), mode-division-multiplexing (MDM), as well as hybrid WDM-MDM systems.