High-performance silicon photonic tri-state switch based on balanced nested Mach-Zehnder interferometer

This work proposes a novel silicon photonic tri-state (cross/bar/blocking) switch, featuring high-speed switching, broadband operation, and crosstalk-free performance. The switch is designed based on a 2 × 2 balanced nested Mach-Zehnder interferometer structure with carrier injection phase tuning. As compared to silicon photonic dual-state (cross/bar) switches based on Mach-Zehnder interferometers with carrier injection phase tuning, the proposed switch not only has better performance in cross/bar switching but also provides an extra blocking state. The unique blocking state has a great advantage in applications of N × N switch fabrics, where idle switching elements in the fabrics can be configured to the blocking state for crosstalk suppression. According to our numerical experiments on a fully loaded 8 × 8 dilated Banyan switch fabric, the worst output crosstalk of the 8 × 8 switch can be dramatically suppressed by more than 50 dB, by assigning the blocking state to idle switching elements in the fabric. The results of this work can extend the functionality of silicon photonic switches and significantly improve the performance of on-chip N × N photonic switching technologies.