Large-scale silicon photonics switch based on 45-nm CMOS technology

In optical networks for telecom and datacom, an unprecedented energy efficient system is demanded since the amount of data traffic is rapidly increasing while a significant improvement of the energy efficiency in electronics devices such as switch ASICs is no longer expected. To overcome the energy constraints, introduction of energy-efficient optical circuit switching (OCS) to the conventional electrical packet switching network is considered. The energy consumption of the OCS is almost independent of the bandwidth because the transparent optical path with no optical-to-electrical/electrical-to-optical signal conversion supports an ultrawide bandwidth of highly multiplexed optical signals. In the OCS, high-speed and large-port-count optical switches are essential. We have been working on optical switches based on CMOS-compatible silicon photonics that offer fast switching, compactness, low power consumption, and low cost. By using our 45-nm CMOS process, we have recently demonstrated a low loss 32 x 32 silicon photonics switch and its performance improvements of wide operation bandwidth, polarization-independent operation, and so forth. In this paper, we review the recent progress of our silicon photonics switches. We discuss the importance of the silicon photonics switches for a sustainable optical network with a comparison of other switching technologies and explain comprehensively how our numerous achievements are advanced and related to each other.