Wavelength-selective 4 × 4 nonblocking silicon optical router for networks-on-chip

We design and fabricate a wavelength-selective nonblocking 4 × 4 silicon optical router based on microring resonator for use in future integrated photonic interconnection networks. We successfully demonstrate 12 possible I/O routing paths and present 13 nonblocking operating states, including four broadcasting states, with worst-case extinction ratio and cross talk of 21.05 and -21.56 dB, respectively. Thermal tuning is employed to compensate the resonance shift of microring resonators caused by fabrication errors and adjust the resonance to match the International Telecommunication Unit grid with the channel spacing of 100 GHz.