A 3.9ns 8.9mW 4×4 silicon photonic switch hybrid integrated with CMOS driver

The emerging field of silicon photonics targets monolithic integration of optical components in the CMOS process, potentially enabling high bandwidth, high density interconnects with dramatically reduced cost and power dissipation. A broadband photonic switch is a key component of reconfigurable networks which retain data in the optical domain, thus bypassing the latency, bandwidth and power overheads of opto-electronic conversion. Additionally, with WDM channels, multiple data streams can be routed simultaneously using a single optical device. Although many types of discrete silicon photonic switches have been reported, very few of them have been shown to operate with CMOS drivers. Earlier, we have reported two different 2×2 optical switches wirebond packaged with 90nm CMOS drivers. The 2×2 switch reported in is based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI), while the one reported in is based on a two-ring resonator.