16-Channel modular platform for automatic control and reconfiguration of complex photonic circuits

A mixed-signal electronic system allowing closed-loop control of 16 independent integrated photonic devices equipped with CLIPP transparent optical probes (-35 dBm sensitivity, 50 kHz speed) is presented. It features a 32-channel CMOS lock-in front-end (203 nV /√Hz noise, 100 dB dynamic range), interfaced via conditioning chains to multiple ADCs and DACs driven by a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA for real-time processing, including the generation and demodulation of multiple pilot tones for channel labeling and dithering-based feedback. The results of the platform characterization are reported, along with the first application of automatic control applied to a novel all-optical unscrambler for mode-division multiplexing.