Silicon photonic switches hybrid-integrated with CMOS drivers

This paper describes the design and measured performance of three different silicon photonic switches: a 2×2 switch, a 1×2 switch, and a 4×4 switch. All of the devices have been hybrid integrated with a corresponding custom 90-nm CMOS driver. The 2×2 switch is based on a wavelength-insensitive Mach-Zehnder interferometer (WIMZ) and the 1×2 is based on a two-ring resonator. The power dissipation of the 2×2 WIMZ switch was 2 mW from a 1.0-V supply, with measured transition time of 3.9 ns. The 4×4 switch, composed of six 2×2 Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) switches was demonstrated to route 3×40 Gb/s WDM data with BER <; 10-12, with less than -10-dB crosstalk and 7-dB loss. © 1966-2012 IEEE.