Arbitrary access to optical carriers in silicon photonic mode/wavelength hybrid division multiplexing circuits.

The manipulation of optical modes directly in a multimode waveguide without affecting the transmission of undesired signal carriers is of significance to realize a flexible and simple structured optical network-on-chip. In this Letter, an arbitrary optical mode and wavelength carrier access scheme is proposed based on a series of multimode microring resonators and one multimode bus waveguide with constant width. As a proof-of-concept, a three-mode (de)multiplexing device is designed, fabricated, and experimentally demonstrated.

Integrated non-blocking optical router harnessing wavelength- and mode-selective property for photonic networks-on-chip.

In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a 4×4 non-blocking optical router utilizing 8 mode (de)multiplexers and a 4×4 microring-based grid network, which can passively assign signals carried by optical wavelength and mode channels from an arbitrary input port to corresponding output ports without additional switch time, realizing the non-blocking property. The proposed device is fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator platform using the standard Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication processes. The insertion loss is lower than 5.