Open AccessSoftware-defined control-plane for wavelength selective unicast and multicast of optical data in a silicon photonic platform
Author(s) -
Alexander Gazman,
Colm Browning,
Mehdi N. Bahadori,
Ziyi Zhu,
Payman Samadi,
Sébastien Rumley,
Vidak Vujicic,
Liam P. Barry,
Keren Bergman
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.25.000232
Subject(s) - unicast , computer science , multicast , silicon photonics , photonics , optoelectronics , resonator , optics , materials science , electronic engineering , physics , computer network , engineering
We demonstrate a programmable control-plane based on field programmable gate array (FPGA) with a power-efficient algorithm for optical unicast, multicast, and broadcast functionalities in a silicon photonic platform. The platform includes a silicon photonic 1×8 microring array chip which in conjunction with a fast tunable laser over the C-band is capable of delivering software controlled wavelength selective functionality on top of spatial switching. We characterize the thermo-optic response of microring resonators and extract key parameters necessary for the development of the control-plane. The performance of the proposed architecture is tested with 10 Gb/s on-off keying (OOK) optical data and error-free operation is verified for various wavelength and spatial switching scenarios. Lastly, we evaluate electrical power and energy consumption required to reconfigure the silicon photonic device for all possible wavelength operations and output ports combinations and show that unicast, multicast of two, three, four, five, six, seven, and broadcast functions are achieved with energy overheads of 0.02, 0.07, 0.18, 0.49, 0.76, 1.01, 1.3, and 1.55 pJ/bit, respectively.