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Self-calibrating programmable photonic integrated circuits

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 595–602 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are dense assemblies of tunable elements that provide flexible reconfigurability to enable different functions to be selected; however, due to manufacturing variations and thermal gradients that affect the optical phases of the elements, it is difficult to guarantee a stable correspondence between the electrical commands to the chip, and the function that it provides. Here we demonstrate a self-calibrating programmable PIC with full control over its complex impulse response, in the presence of thermal cross-talk between phase-tuning elements. Self-calibration is achieved by: (1) incorporating an optical reference path into the PIC; (2) using the Kramers–Kronig relationship to recover the phase response from amplitude measurements; and (3) applying a fast-converging self-calibration algorithm. We demonstrate dial-up signal processing functions with complex impulse responses using only 25 training iterations. This approach offers stable and accurate control of large-scale PICs, for demanding applications such as communications network reconfiguration, neuromorphic hardware accelerators and quantum computers.

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Fig. 1: Conceptual diagram of the self-calibrating integrated broadband PIC.
Fig. 2: Experimental results for on-chip Kramers–Kronig phase recovery.
Fig. 3: The 8-tap signal processing core’s parameter evolution during the self-calibration process.
Fig. 4: Results of self-calibration implementing complex sinc filters.
Fig. 5: Results of self-calibration implementing a Hilbert transformer, half-band lowpass and highpass filters, and a differentiator.

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Data availability

The authors declare that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information.

Code availability

The authors declare that the algorithm supporting the findings of this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary Information.

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Zhuang, Y. Xie and S. Schoenhardt for the layout and tests of the FIR chip in prior projects. We thank B. Corcoran for the discussion of experiments. We thank A. Linzner for the fabrication of metal chip holders. We thank LioniX International, the Netherlands, for fabricating the FIR chip. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects Program (grant no. DP190101576, DP190102773).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electro-Photonics Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Xingyuan Xu, Tim Feleppa, Xumeng Liu & Arthur J. Lowery

  2. State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

    Xingyuan Xu

  3. Integrated Photonics and Applications Centre, School of Engineering, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Guanghui Ren, Andreas Boes & Arnan Mitchell

  4. Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) and School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

    Andreas Boes

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Contributions

X.X., A.J.L. and A.B. conceived the idea and designed the project. X.X. performed the numerical simulations and experiments. G.R., A.B. and T.F. prepared experimental hardware. X.X., A.J.L., A.B., G.R., X.L. and A.M. contributed to the development of the experiment and to the data analysis. X.X. and A.J.L. wrote the manuscript with inputs from all other authors. A.J.L. and A.B. supervised the research.

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Correspondence to Xingyuan Xu.

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Nature Photonics thanks Daniel Perez-Lopez and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Discussion and Figs. 1–12.

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Xu, X., Ren, G., Feleppa, T. et al. Self-calibrating programmable photonic integrated circuits. Nat. Photon. 16, 595–602 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-01020-z

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