Integrated five-port non-blocking optical router based on mode-selective property

In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a five-port optical router based on mode-selective property. It utilizes different combinations of four spatial modes at input and output ports as labels to distinguish its 20 routing paths. It can direct signals from the source port to the destination port intelligently without power consumption and additional switching time to realize various path steering. The proposed architecture is constructed by asymmetric directional coupler based mode-multiplexers/de-multiplexers, multimode interference based waveguide crossings and single-mode interconnect waveguides. The broad optical bandwidths of these constituents make the device suitable to combine with wavelength division multiplexing signal transmission, which can effectively increase the data throughput. Measurement results show that the insertion loss of its 20 routing paths are lower than 8.5 dB and the optical signal-to-noise ratios are larger than 16.3 dB at 1525–1565 nm. To characterize its routing functionality, a 40-Gbps data transmission with bit-error-rate (BER) measurement is implemented. The power penalties for the error-free switching (BER<10−9) are 1.0 dB and 0.8 dB at 1545 nm and 1565 nm, respectively.