Hu Yinpeng, Sun Yi, Lu Ye, Li Huan, Liu Liu, Shi Yaocheng, Dai Daoxin
State Key Laboratory of Extreme Photonics and Instrumentation, College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China.
Jiaxing Key Laboratory of Photonic Sensing & Intelligent Imaging, Jiaxing, 314000, China.
Nat Commun. 2025 Jan 2;16(1):331. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-55528-9.
The continuous push for high-performance photonic switches is one of the most crucial premises for the sustainable scaling of programmable and reconfigurable photonic circuits for a wide spectrum of applications. Conventional optical switches rely on the perturbative mechanisms of mode coupling or mode interference, resulting in inherent bottlenecks in their switching performance concerning size, power consumption and bandwidth. Here we propose and realize a silicon photonic 2×2 elementary switch based on a split waveguide crossing (SWX) consisting of two halves. The propagation direction of the incident light is manipulated to implement the OFF/ON states by splitting/combining the two halves of the SWX, showing excellent performance with low excess loss and low crosstalk over an ultrawide bandwidth. Both elementary switch and a 64×64 switch array based on Benes topology are fabricated and characterized, demonstrating great potential for practical scenarios such as photonic interconnect/routing, Lidar and spectroscopy, photonic computing, as well as microwave photonics.
对高性能光子开关的持续追求是实现适用于广泛应用的可编程和可重构光子电路可持续扩展的最关键前提之一。传统光开关依赖于模式耦合或模式干涉的微扰机制，这在开关性能的尺寸、功耗和带宽方面导致了固有的瓶颈。在此，我们提出并实现了一种基于由两部分组成的分裂波导交叉（SWX）的硅光子2×2基本开关。通过分离/合并SWX的两部分来操纵入射光的传播方向以实现关/开状态，在超宽带宽上表现出具有低额外损耗和低串扰的优异性能。我们制备并表征了基本开关和基于贝内斯拓扑的64×64开关阵列，证明了其在光子互连/路由、激光雷达和光谱学、光子计算以及微波光子学等实际场景中的巨大潜力。
