Integrated, Scalable and Reconfigurable Silicon Photonics Based Optical Switch for Colorless, Directionless and Contentionless Operation

We demonstrate a BCD8sP electronic-photonic integrated device for low cost, low power, and mass-manufacturable optical switching. Our network on-chip has one thousand photonic components, each driven by a dedicated electronic control circuit. The architecture implements a transponder aggregator scheme that manages 12 200GHz-spaced wavelengths in 4 different directions and 8 add/drop ports. The 3D integration of the photonic and the electronic chips allows the complete system reconfiguration at microsecond regime. The packaged device shows a total insertion loss of −22dB, including input and output coupling, and a channel isolation better than 35dB, in a device with a chip area of less than 1cm2.