Optics Express
Cascaded optical resonator-based programmable photonic integrated circuits
Tae‐Won Park, Youngjae Jeong, Kyoungsik Yu
Abstract
Programmable photonic integrated circuits have mainly been developed based on the single wavelength channel operation of fundamental building blocks consisting of Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) with tunable phase shifters. We propose and study optical circuit models consisting of cascaded optical resonators that enable the independent operation of multiple wavelength channels in a more compact footprint than the conventional MZIs. By adopting experimental values reported for silicon micro-ring resonators, the fidelities of different types of 2×2 unitary transformations and higher-dimensional unitary transformations are examined by employing the Reck algorithm and the Clements algorithm.