Control and Calibration Recipes for Photonic Integrated Circuits

This article presents the key ingredients and the best practices for implementing simple, effective and robust control and calibration procedures for arbitrary photonic integrated circuit (PIC) architectures. Three main features are presented and discussed: a technique to cancel out the effects of mutual crosstalk among thermal tuners, the exploitation of labelling to identify different optical signals, the use of input modulated signal to automatically reshape the frequency response of the device. Examples of application are then illustrated to show the validity and generality of the approach, namely a cross-bar interconnect matrix router, a variable bandwidth filter and third order coupled microring filter. Further, the automatic and dynamic generation of the lookup table of add/drop hitless filters operating on a dense wavelength division multiplexing grid is demonstrated. The lookup table achieved with the proposed approach can dynamically update itself to new conditions of the chip or new requirements of operation, such as variations in channel modulation format or perturbation induced by neighboring devices due to a change in their working point.