Analysis of Microresonator-Based Logic Gate for High-Speed Optical Computing in Integrated Photonics

Microresonator modulators are commonly used as electrical-optic (EO) logic gates in computing systems on silicon photonics platform. In this article, we provide a compact analytical model to describe the switching properties of a linearly cascaded microresonator modulator array. The analytical model is verified by simulations on commercial software. Switching properties of microresonators under different modulation conditions are investigated. Furthermore, computing modules where microresonator modulators are cascaded in series are also discussed, where the model of microresonators is provided by AIM Photonics Process Design Kit (PDK). Factors that deteriorate the logic outputs are analyzed and methods to improve the accuracy of logic outputs are proposed and demonstrated with 8 microresonator modulators.