2019/12/19 by T. Hoose, Matthias Blaicher, Hoose, Tobias +17
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Photonic and Optical Devices #Semiconductor Lasers and Optical Devices #Photonic Crystals and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1912.09942
Photonic integrated circuits (PIC) currently rely on application-specific\ndesigns that are geared towards a particular functionality. Development of such\napplication-specific PIC requires considerable effort and often involves\nseveral design, fabrication, and characterization iterations, each with cycle\ntimes of several months, to reach acceptable performance. At the same time, the\nnumber of chips that is eventually needed to serve a certain application is\noften too small to benefit from the scalability of advanced photonic\nintegration platforms. As a consequence, large-scale photonic integration has\nhitherto been unable to unfold its full economic advantages within the highly\nfragmented application space of photonics. Here we introduce a novel approach\nto configurable PIC that can overcome these challenges. The concept exploits\ngeneric PIC designs consisting of standard building blocks that can be\nconcatenated to provide an application-specific functionality. Configuration of\nthe PIC relies on establishing hardwired optical connections between suitable\nports of an optical wire board using highly flexible 3D direct-write laser\nlithography. Hardwire-configurable PIC allow to exploit high-throughput\nproduction of generic chips in large-scale fabrication facilities for serving a\nwide variety of applications with small or medium volumes of specifically\nconfigured devices.\n