9:15 AM - 9:30 AM
△ [16a-422-2] First Demonstration of Dynamic Mode-Switching by Using Optical Mode Switch
Keywords:optical switch, optical mode
Optical switch is attractive because it decreases the power consumption of the router by eliminating the optical-electrical-optical (OEO) signal exchange. One of the optical switch is based on Si-wire waveguide, known as the optical spatial switch. One of the advantage by using Si-wire waveguide is the possibility to realize revolution of on-chip communication. Moreover, silicon photonics offers a merit of dense footprint and also nanosecond scale reconfiguration time using electro-optic phase shifter. Scalability for high integration has been one critical issue for optical spatial switch. Thus, to realize the optical switching we have proposed optical mode switch to overcome this scalability issue.As mode is switched by using phase shift based-on current injection, it is possible to switch mode dynamically, however, there has been no report of dynamic mode-switching so far. In this work, dynamic mode-switching is demonstrated for the first time. At least less than 64 ns switching time, for the both 0th-to-1st and 1st-to-0th, was confirmed for the first time. More than 1200 ns status-holding was also confirmed successfully.