In order to enable optical systems to operate with a high degree of compactness and reliability it is necessary to combine large number of optical functions in small monolithic structures. A development, somewhat reminiscent of that that took place in Integrated Electronics, is now beginning to take place in optics. The initial challenge in this emerging field, known appropriately as "Integrated Optics", is to demonstrate the possibility of performing basic optical functions such as light generation, coupling, modulation, and guiding in Integrated Optical configurations. The talk will review the main theoretical and experimental developments to date in Integrated Optics. Specific topics to be discussed include: Material considerations, guiding mechanisms, modulation, coupling and mode losses. The fabrication and applications of periodic thin film structures will be discussed.

Integrated optics

Modern data centers increasingly rely on interconnects for delivering critical communications connectivity among numerous servers, memory, and computation resources. Data center interconnects turned to optical communications almost a decade ago, and the recent acceleration in data center requirements is expected to further drive photonic interconnect technologies deeper into the systems architecture. This review paper analyzes optical technologies that will enable next-generation data center optical interconnects. Recent progress addressing the challenges of terabit/s links and networks at the laser, modulator, photodiode, and switch levels is reported and summarized.

Recent advances in optical technologies for data centers: a review

Lithium niobate (LN), an outstanding and versatile material, has influenced our daily life for decades: from enabling high-speed optical communications that form the backbone of the Internet to realizing radio-frequency filtering used in our cell phones. This half-century-old material is currently embracing a revolution in thin-film LN integrated photonics. The success of manufacturing wafer-scale, high-quality, thin films of LN on insulator (LNOI), accompanied with breakthroughs in nanofabrication techniques, have made high-performance integrated nanophotonic components possible. With rapid development in the past few years, some of these thin-film LN devices, such as optical modulators and nonlinear wavelength converters, have already outperformed their legacy counterparts realized in bulk LN crystals. Furthermore, the nanophotonic integration enabled ultra-low-loss resonators in LN, which unlocked many novel applications such as optical frequency combs and quantum transducers. In this Review, we cover -- from basic principles to the state of the art -- the diverse aspects of integrated thin-film LN photonics, including the materials, basic passive components, and various active devices based on electro-optics, all-optical nonlinearities, and acousto-optics. We also identify challenges that this platform is currently facing and point out future opportunities. The field of integrated LNOI photonics is advancing rapidly and poised to make critical impacts on a broad range of applications in communication, signal processing, and quantum information.

/pdf/integrated-photonics-on-thin-film-lithium-niobate-55z73oui6u.pdf

Integrated photonics on thin-film lithium niobate

The data-science revolution is poised to transform the way photonic systems are simulated and designed. Photonic systems are, in many ways, an ideal substrate for machine learning: the objective of much of computational electromagnetics is the capture of nonlinear relationships in high-dimensional spaces, which is the core strength of neural networks. Additionally, the mainstream availability of Maxwell solvers makes the training and evaluation of neural networks broadly accessible and tailorable to specific problems. In this Review, we show how deep neural networks, configured as discriminative networks, can learn from training sets and operate as high-speed surrogate electromagnetic solvers. We also examine how deep generative networks can learn geometric features in device distributions and even be configured to serve as robust global optimizers. Fundamental data-science concepts framed within the context of photonics are also discussed, including the network-training process, delineation of different network classes and architectures, and dimensionality reduction. Neural networks can capture nonlinear relationships in high-dimensional spaces and are powerful tools for photonic-system modelling. This Review discusses how deep neural networks can serve as surrogate electromagnetic solvers, inverse modelling tools and global device optimizers.

Deep neural networks for the evaluation and design of photonic devices

Lithium niobate (LN), an outstanding and versatile material, has influenced our daily life for decades—from enabling high-speed optical communications that form the backbone of the Internet to realizing radio-frequency filtering used in our cell phones. This half-century-old material is currently embracing a revolution in thin-film LN integrated photonics. The successes of manufacturing wafer-scale, high-quality thin films of LN-on-insulator (LNOI) and breakthroughs in nanofabrication techniques have made high-performance integrated nanophotonic components possible. With rapid development in the past few years, some of these thin-film LN devices, such as optical modulators and nonlinear wavelength converters, have already outperformed their legacy counterparts realized in bulk LN crystals. Furthermore, the nanophotonic integration has enabled ultra-low-loss resonators in LN, which has unlocked many novel applications such as optical frequency combs and quantum transducers. In this review, we cover—from basic principles to the state of the art—the diverse aspects of integrated thin-film LN photonics, including the materials, basic passive components, and various active devices based on electro-optics, all-optical nonlinearities, and acousto-optics. We also identify challenges that this platform is currently facing and point out future opportunities. The field of integrated LNOI photonics is advancing rapidly and poised to make critical impacts on a broad range of applications in communication, signal processing, and quantum information.

/pdf/integrated-photonics-on-thin-film-lithium-niobate-3tfumu49q8.pdf

Photonic switches are increasingly considered for insertion in high performance datacenter architectures to meet the growing performance demands of interconnection networks. We provide an overview of photonic switching technologies and develop an evaluation methodology for assessing their potential impact on datacenter performance. We begin with a review of three categories of optical switches, namely, free-space switches, III-V integrated switches and silicon integrated switches. The state-of-the-art of MEMS, LCOS, SOA, MZI and MRR switching technologies are covered, together with insights on their performance limitations and scalability considerations. The performance metrics that are required for optical switches to truly emerge in datacenters are discussed and summarized, with special focus on the switching time, cost, power consumption, scalability and optical power penalty. Furthermore, the Pareto front of the switch metric space is analyzed. Finally, we propose a hybrid integrated switch fabric design using the III-V/Si wafer bonding technique and investigate its potential impact on realizing reduced cost and power penalty.

Photonic switching in high performance datacenters [Invited]

A detailed analysis of fundamental tradeoffs between ring radius and coupling gap size is presented to draw realistic borders of the possible design space for microring resonators (MRRs). The coupling coefficient for the ring-waveguide structure is estimated based on an integration of the nonuniform gap between the ring and the waveguide. Combined with the supermode analysis of two coupled waveguides, this approach is further expanded into a closed-form equation that describes the coupling strength. This equation permits to evaluate how the distance separating a waveguide from a ring resonator, and the ring radius, affect coupling. The effect of ring radius on the bending loss of the ring is furthermore modeled based on the measurements for silicon MRRs with different radii. These compact models for coupling and loss are subsequently used to derive the main optical properties of MRRs, such as 3-dB optical bandwidth, extinction ratio of resonance, and insertion loss, hence identifying the design space. Our results indicate that the design space for add-drop filters in a wavelength division multiplexed link is currently limited to 5–10 $\mu$ m in radius and gap sizes ranging from 120 to 210 nm. The good agreement between the results from the proposed compact model for coupling and the numerical FDTD and experimental measurements indicate the application of our approach in realizing fast and efficient design space exploration of MRRs in silicon photonic interconnects.

Design Space Exploration of Microring Resonators in Silicon Photonic Interconnects: Impact of the Ring Curvature

The paper presents a comprehensive physical layer design and modeling platform for silicon photonic interconnects. The platform is based on explicit closed-form expressions for optical power penalties, derived for both signal-dependent and signal-independent noise contexts. Our models agree well with reported experimental measurements. We show how the modeling approach is used for the design space exploration of silicon photonic links and can be leveraged to optimize the wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) capacity, evaluate the scalability, and study the sensitivity of the system to key device parameters. We apply the methodology to the design of microring-based silicon photonic links, including an evaluation of the impairments associated with cascaded ring modulators, as well as the spectral distortion and crosstalk effects of demultiplexer ring arrays for nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) ON–OFF keying (OOK) modulated WDM signals. We show that the total capacity of a chip-to-chip microring-based WDM silicon photonic link designed with recently reported interconnect device parameters can approach 2 Tb/s realized with NRZ-OOK data modulation and 45 wavelengths each modulated at 45 Gb/s.

Comprehensive Design Space Exploration of Silicon Photonic Interconnects

Face-to-face comparison of major large scale HPC interconnects.Review of challenges and solutions for increased use of optics in HPC.Description of optical switching, in terms of principle, limitations, technical requirements and benefits. Large-scale high performance computing is permeating nearly every corner of modern applications spanning from scientific research and business operations, to medical diagnostics, and national security. All these communities rely on computer systems to process vast volumes of data quickly and efficiently, yet progress toward increased computing power has experienced a slowdown in the last number of years. The sheer cost and scale, stemming from the need for extreme parallelism, are among the reasons behind this stall. In particular, very large-scale, ultra-high bandwidth interconnects, essential for maintaining computation performance, represent an increasing portion of the total cost budget.Photonic systems are often cited as ways to break through the energy-bandwidth limitations of conventional electrical wires toward drastically improving interconnect performance. This paper presents an overview of the challenges associated with large-scale interconnects, and reviews how photonic technologies can contribute to addressing these challenges. We review some important aspects of photonics that should not be underestimated in order to truly reap the benefits of cost and power reduction.

Meisam Bahadori

Papers

Recent advances in optical technologies for data centers: a review

Photonic switching in high performance datacenters [Invited]

Design Space Exploration of Microring Resonators in Silicon Photonic Interconnects: Impact of the Ring Curvature

Comprehensive Design Space Exploration of Silicon Photonic Interconnects

Optical interconnects for extreme scale computing systems