Flexible on-chip mode-division switching with a new mode converter design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel on-chip mode converter capable of arbitrary mode switching via phase tuning, enabling flexible, scalable mode-division switching architectures compatible with WDM for dense optical networks.

Contribution

The paper presents the first demonstration of a versatile mode converter for arbitrary mode conversion and proposes two flexible on-chip mode-division switching architectures.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated arbitrary mode conversion with phase tuning.

Proposed architectures are compatible with wavelength-division multiplexing.

Potential to enable dense, flexible on-chip optical networks.

Abstract

There have been some significant advances in optical-fiber multimode communications. And important effort in on-chip communication has also been recently reported for realizing mode-division multiplexing (MDM). Because of the difficulty in lack of mode converter which can freely perform mode converting function among different waveguide modes, flexible on-chip mode-division switching communication has been rarely reported. Here we show the first demonstration of mode converter which can convert an arbitrary waveguide mode into any other modes with the help of phase tuning. With that mode converter, two flexible on-chip mode-division switching architectures are proposed. That architecture is compatible with wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and can enable further scaling of the on-chip communication bandwidth. Our demonstration suggests great potential of mode-divisional switching in the vision of fully flexible, dense, on-chip optical networks.