Operating performance of silicon photonic optical switches integrated with WDM filters for low-latency edge-computing platforms

Abstract

We investigated the performance of a silicon photonic device integrating pn-junction-type Mach-Zehnder interferometer optical switches with wavelength-division-demultiplexing and multiplexing (WDM-DEMUX and MUX) filters that perform switching operations to transmit packet data between edge computing. After separating the 1535 and 1565 nm signals with the Mach-Zehnder delay interferometer-type WDM-DEMUX/MUX filters, cascaded dynamic switching operation with a few nanoseconds turn-on/off for On-Off keying (OOK) signals at 10 Gbps were achieved. The power penalty difference between the input and output was within 0.5 dB for 1565-nm signals. We also verified the switching operation at a bit rate of 25 Gbps and observed clear eye openings.