Assessing the Impact of Design Options for an Optical Switch in Network Routing Impairments

In order to enable the maximum capacity in state-of-the art optical networks, a full orchestration with the physical layer is mandatory. Such an objective is obtained by abstracting network elements starting from the component design up to the networking management. To this purpose, a software (SW) environment which is vertically integrated across the networking layers is a mandatory support for engineering network infrastructure, or to virtually test the impact of a component design option on higher layer performance. Synopsys proposes an integrated SW environment for photonic integrated circuit (PIC) and system design that aims at satisfying this requirement: it is the integration of OptSim© -optical communication system, OptSim Circuit -schematic-driven photonic circuit, OptoDesigner© -mask layout, and RSoft component design tools. These tools have proven to be reliable aids to virtually designing and estimating the performance of optical transmission systems and photonic chips. In this work, we rely on such an integrated SW environment to assess the impact on networking operations of design options for an optical switch in Silicon Photonics using Analog Photonics (AP) Process Design Kit (PDK) component library elements [1]. Specifically, we address the transmission impairments and consequent reduction in Quality- of-Transmission (QoT) implied by multi-hop routing in meshed optical networks. Using the vertical integration of the Synopsys SW environment, we analyze the considered optical switch and by simulation, we obtain a layer-0 abstraction. So, we simulate its propagation impact, assessing a QoT-degradation depending on the design option and also depending of the choice for the transmission technique. Finally, we derive the impact of network routing addressing the QoT degradation vs. number of traversed switches.