Wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM)-based integrated electronic–photonic switching network (EPSN) for high-speed data processing and transportation

Integrated photonics offers attractive solutions for realizing combinational logic for high-performance computing. The integrated photonic chips can be further optimized using multiplexing techniques such as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM). In this paper, we propose a WDM-based electronic–photonic switching network (EPSN) to realize the functions of the binary decoder and the multiplexer, which are fundamental elements in microprocessors for data transportation and processing. We experimentally demonstrate its practicality by implementing a 3–8 (three inputs, eight outputs) switching network operating at 20 Gb/s. Detailed performance analysis and performance enhancement techniques are also given in this paper.