Four-port mode-selective silicon optical router for on-chip optical interconnect

We propose and demonstrate a four-port mode-selective optical router on a silicon-on-insulator platform. The passive routing property ensures that the router consumes no power to establish the optical links. For each port, input signals with different modes are selectively routed to the target ports through the pre-designed architecture. In general, the device intrinsically supports broadcasting of multiplexed signals from one port to the other three ports through mode division multiplexing. In some applications, the input signal from one port would only be sent to another port as in reconfigurable optical routers. The prototype is constructed by mode multiplexers/de-multiplexers and single-mode interconnect waveguides between them. The insertion losses for all optical links are lower than 8.0 dB, and the largest optical crosstalk values are lower than -18.7 dB and -22.0 dB for the broadcasting and port-to-port routing modes, respectively, at the wavelength range of 1525-1565 nm. In order to verify the routing functionality, a 40-Gbps bidirectional data transmission experiment is performed. The device offers a promising building block for passive routing by utilizing the dimension of the modes.