Chip-Scale Reconfigurable Optical Full-Field Manipulation: Enabling a Compact Grooming Photonic Signal Processor
Shuang Zheng, Yun‐Ze Long, Dingshan Gao, Yan Luo, Lulu Wang, Xiaoping Cao, Jian Wang
Abstract
Waveshaper, a programmable optical processor providing a variety of optical filtering and switching functions, has attracted great attention in the past decade, especially in optical communications. However, the conventional waveshaper consisting of discrete optical elements is bulky, complicated, and expensive. Here, we present a compact waveshaper of grooming photonic signal processor enabled by chip-scale reconfigurable optical full-field manipulation (amplitude, phase). By monolithically integrating two modified arrayed-waveguide-gratings (M-AWGs) with an array of Mach–Zehnder switches (MZSs) on a single silicon chip, a compact reconfigurable multifunctional photonic signal processor is implemented. The M-AWGs are specially designed to have appropriate neighboring channel overlap to allow phase manipulation when incorporated into a photonic signal processor system with an array of MZSs. We demonstrate on-chip 640-Gbit/s throughput, granularity-flexible programmable optical filtering, and reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexing, showing favorable performance. The demonstrations may open up new perspectives for practical, generalized, N-dimensional, and intelligent photonic signal processor chips.