Automated tuning, control and stabilization of photonic integrated circuits
2017
The complexity scaling of silicon photonics circuits is raising novel needs related to control. Reconfigurable
architectures need fast, accurate and robust procedures for the tuning and stabilization of their working point,
counteracting temperature drifts originated by environmental fluctuations and mutual thermal crosstalk from surrounding
integrated devices. In this contribution, we report on our recent achievements on the automated tuning, control and
stabilization of silicon photonics architectures. The proposed control strategy exploits transparent integrated detectors to
monitor non-invasively the light propagating in the silicon waveguides in key spots of the circuit. Local monitoring
enables the partitioning of complex architectures in small photonic cells that can be easily tuned and controlled, with
need for neither preliminary circuit calibration nor global optimization algorithms. The ability to monitor the Quality Of
of Transmission (QoT) of the optical paths in Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) is also demonstrated with the use of
channel labelling and non-invasive light monitoring. Several examples of applications are presented that include the
automatic reconfiguration and feedback controlled stabilization of an 8×8 switch fabric based on Mach-Zehnder
interferometers (MZIs) and the realization of a wavelength locking platform enabling feedback-control of silicon
microring resonators (MRRs) for the realization of a 4×10 Gbit/s wavelength-division-multiplexing transmitter. The
effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed approach for tuning and stabilization of the presented architectures is
demonstrated by showing that no significant performance degradation is observed under uncooled operation for the
silicon chip.
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