The demand for scalable, high-performance optical switches is growing, and ALLEGRO is tackling this challenge with an innovative hybrid optical switch system. Our O-band optical switch consists of two key sections:
🔹 Silicon photonics switching – leveraging MZI switches with thermo-optic phase shifters
🔹 III-V SOA amplification – developed by TU/e, ensuring the required on-chip gain
Our design prioritizes strictly non-blocking topologies, ensuring that reconfiguring one port does not disrupt the rest of the network. After evaluating multiple architectures (PILOSS, DLN, dilated Benes, crossbar), we selected crossbar for our first tape-out, balancing crosstalk and stage count for optimal performance.
📡 The silicon photonics chip, designed by NVIDIA, is fabricated through a commercial MPW service, bringing cutting-edge photonics closer to real-world deployment.
This work is a major step toward high-efficiency, reconfigurable optical networking. Looking forward to the next phase of development! 🚀
#Photonics #OpticalSwitching #SiliconPhotonics #SOA #Datacom #Innovation #MPW #WDM
