Foundry-Enabled Scalable All-to-All Optical Interconnects Using Silicon Nitride Arrayed Waveguide Router Interposers and Silicon Photonic Transceivers

This paper summarizes our latest results of integrated all-to-all optical interconnect systems using compact, low-loss silicon nitride (SiN) arrayed waveguide grating router (AWGR) through AIM photonics' multiple-project-wafer services. In particular, we have designed, taped out, and initially characterized a chip-scale silicon photonic low-latency interconnect optical network switch (Si-LIONS) system with an 8 x 8 200 GHz spacing cyclic SiN AWGR, 64 microdisk modulators, and 64 ON-chip germanium photodector (PD). The 8 x 8 SiN AWGR in design has a measured insertion loss of 1.8 dB and a crosstalk of -13 dB, with a footprint of 1.3 mm x 0.9 mm. We measured an error-free performance of the microdisk modulator at 10 Gb/s upon 1Vpp voltage swing. We demonstrated wavelength routing with error-free data transmission using the ON-chip modulator, SiN AWGR, and an external PD. We have designed and taped out the optical interposer version of the all-to-all system using SiN waveguides and low-loss chip-to-interposer couplers. Finally, we illustrate our preliminary designs and results of 16x16 and 32x32 SiN AWGRs, and discuss the possibility of scaling beyond 1024 x 1024 all-to-all interconnections with reduced number of wavelengths (e.g., 64) using the Thin-CLOS architecture.