Experimental demonstration of a 24-port packaged multi-microring network-on-chip in silicon photonic platform

A 24-port packaged multi-microring optical network-on-chip has been tested for simultaneous co- and counter-propagating transmissions at the same wavelength at 10 Gbps. In the co-propagating scenario communications up to five hops with one interfering signal have been tested, together with transmissions impaired by up to three interfering signals. In the counter-propagating scenario the device performance has been investigated exploiting the ring resonators in both shared-source and shared-destination configurations. The spectral characterization is in good agreement with the theoretical results. Bit-error-rate measurements indicate power penalties at BER=10^-9 limited to (i) 0.5 dB in the co-propagating scenarios independently from the number of interfering transmissions, (ii) 0.8 dB in the counter-propagating scenario with shared-source configuration, and (iii) 2 dB in the counter-propagating scenario with shared-destination configuration.