Thick-SOI Echelle grating for any-to-any wavelength routing interconnection in multi-socket computing environments

G. Dabos, S. Pitris, C. Mitsolidou, T. Alexoudi, D. Fitsios, Matteo Cherchi, Mikko Harjanne, Timo Aalto, G.T. Kanellos, N. Pleros

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference article in proceedingsScientificpeer-review

    10 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    As data centers constantly expand, electronic switches are facing the challenge of enhanced scalability and the request for increased pin-count and bandwidth. Photonic technology and wavelength division multiplexing have always been a strong alternative for efficient routing and their potential was already proven in the telecoms. CWDM transceivers have emerged in the board-to-board level interconnection, revealing the potential for wavelength-routing to be applied in the datacom and an AWGR-based approach has recently been proposed towards building an optical multi-socket interconnection to offer any-to-any connectivity with high aggregated throughput and reduced power consumption. Echelle gratings have long been recognized as the multiplexing block exhibiting smallest footprint and robustness in a wide number of applications compared to other alternatives such as the Arrayed Waveguide Grating. Such filtering devices can also perform in a similar way to cyclical AWGR and serve as mid-board routing platforms in multi-socket environments. In this communication, we present such a 3x3 Echelle grating integrated on thick SOI platform with aluminum-coated facets that is shown to perform successful wavelength-routing functionality at 10 Gb/s. The device exhibits a footprint of 60x270 µm2, while the static characterization showed a 3 dB on-chip loss for the best channel. The 3 dB-bandwidth of the channels was 4.5 nm and the free spectral range was 90 nm. The echelle was evaluated in a 2*2 wavelength routing topology, exhibiting a power penalty of below 0.4 dB at 10-9 BER for the C-band. Further experimental evaluations of the platform involve commercially available CWDM datacenter transceivers, towards emulating an optically-interconnected multi-socket environment traffic scenario.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationOptical Interconnects XVII
    EditorsRay T. Chen, Henning Schroder
    PublisherInternational Society for Optics and Photonics SPIE
    ISBN (Print)978-1-5106-0659-3
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2017
    MoE publication typeA4 Article in a conference publication
    EventOptical Interconnects XVII - San Francisco, United States
    Duration: 30 Jan 20171 Feb 2017

    Publication series

    SeriesProceedings of SPIE
    Volume10109
    ISSN0277-786X

    Conference

    ConferenceOptical Interconnects XVII
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CitySan Francisco
    Period30/01/171/02/17

    Keywords

    • cyclic wavelength routing
    • Echelle grating
    • mid-board routing platform
    • multi-socket interconnections
    • thick-SOI
    • OtaNano

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