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A fully reconfigurable photonic integrated signal processor

Nature Photonics volume 10, pages 190–195 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Photonic signal processing has been considered a solution to overcome the inherent electronic speed limitations. Over the past few years, an impressive range of photonic integrated signal processors have been proposed, but they usually offer limited reconfigurability, a feature highly needed for the implementation of large-scale general-purpose photonic signal processors. Here, we report and experimentally demonstrate a fully reconfigurable photonic integrated signal processor based on an InP–InGaAsP material system. The proposed photonic signal processor is capable of performing reconfigurable signal processing functions including temporal integration, temporal differentiation and Hilbert transformation. The reconfigurability is achieved by controlling the injection currents to the active components of the signal processor. Our demonstration suggests great potential for chip-scale fully programmable all-optical signal processing.

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Figure 1: The schematics of the proposed photonic integrated signal processor.
Figure 2: Experimental results when the photonic integrated signal processor is configured as a temporal integrator.
Figure 3: Experimental results when the photonic integrated signal processor is configured as a fractional differentiator.
Figure 4: Experimental results when the photonic integrated signal processor is configured as a Hilbert transformer.

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Acknowledgements

This work was sponsored by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). The authors also acknowledge support from the Nanofabrication Center at UCSB.

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Author notes

  1. Ming Li

    Present address: Present address: State Key Laboratory on Integrated Optoelectronics, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100083, China,

  2. Weilin Liu, Ming Li and Robert S. Guzzon: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microwave Photonics Research Laboratory, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Ontario, Canada

    Weilin Liu, Ming Li & Jianping Yao

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93116, California, USA

    Robert S. Guzzon, Erik J. Norberg, John S. Parker, Mingzhi Lu & Larry A. Coldren

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Contributions

W.L. analysed the data. W.L., M.L., R.S.G. and J.Y. conceived and designed the experiments. W.L., R.S.G., E.J.N., J.S.P., M.L. and L.C. contributed materials and analysis tools. W.L. performed the experiments. W.L., M.L. and J.Y. wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jianping Yao.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Liu, W., Li, M., Guzzon, R. et al. A fully reconfigurable photonic integrated signal processor. Nature Photon 10, 190–195 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2015.281

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